Peter Twinn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The mansion (Engl .: The Mansion ) of Bletchley Park during the Second World War, the headquarters of the British code breaker and is now a museum

Peter Frank George Twinn (born  January 9, 1916 in London , †  October 29, 2004 ) was a British mathematician and cryptanalyst . During the Second World War he contributed significantly to the deciphering of the German rotor key machine Enigma .

Life

In this "cottage" (English: The Cottage ) in Bletchley Park, Peter Twinn worked with Alan Turing , Dillwyn Knox and John Jeffreys on the deciphering of the Enigma

Peter Twinn was born in Streatham , London, during the First World War . After primary school he attended Dulwich College in south-east London and Brasenose College in Oxford, where he completed his studies in mathematics and then obtained a scholarship to study physics.

At the beginning of February 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) (German roughly: "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule"). That was the code name for the military service, which was located about 70 km northwest of London in Bletchley Park ( BP ), and which successfully deciphered communications during the Second World War, which the German military encrypted with their Enigma key machine .

His cryptanalytic work got a significant boost when on July 26 and 27, 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland, there was a legendary secret meeting of British, French and Polish code breakers in the Kabaty forest of Pyry near Warsaw. The Polish code breakers around Marian Rejewski revealed all their knowledge to Twinn's colleague Dillwyn Knox and his boss, Commander Alastair Denniston , the head of the British naval radio reconnaissance. The Poles presented the British with their Enigma replicas, including all cylinders, and explained their successful methods for deciphering German radio messages.

With the help of this information, Peter Twinn and his colleagues succeeded in continuing the work of the Poles successfully and deciphering the German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma from spring 1940 with almost no interruption during the entire Second World War. Peter Twinn was the first British man to break a German Enigma radio message in January 1940 . As a result, Twinn in Hut 8 (German: Baracke 8) under the direction of Alan Turing mainly dealt with the deciphering of the secret communications of the German Navy , with an electromechanical deciphering machine , called the Turing bomb, being of great help.

After the war, Twinn continued to work for the government. In the late 1960s he led the development of hovercraft Hovercraft in the British Ministry of Technology, before joining the board of the Royal Aircraft Establishment to Farnborough changed. In the early 1970s he joined the Natural Environment Research Council . Twinn began later for entomology to interest and earned his doctorate at the University of London on the jumping mechanism of click beetles . In 1999 he and his co-author P. T. Harding wrote an atlas on longhorn beetles (Coleoptera, Cerambycidae). He was also interested in music and played the clarinet and viola . Twinn had been married to Rosamund Fall since 1944, whom he had met in BP in 1944 through his interest in music. They had a son and three daughters.

Works

  • Peter Twinn: The Abwehr Enigma in Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp (Ed.): Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, pp. 123-131. ISBN 0-19-280132-5
  • Peter FG Twinn and PT Harding: Provisional atlas of the longhorn beetles (Coleoptera, Cerambycidae) of Britain . Biological Records Center, Huntingdon 1999. ISBN 1-870393-43-0

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Michael Smith: Enigma decrypted - The "Codebreakers" from Bletchley Park . Heyne, 2000, p. 35. ISBN 3-453-17285-X
  2. ↑ Peter Twinn: The Abwehr Enigma in Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, p. 125. ISBN 0-19-280132-5
  3. ↑ Ralph Erskine: The Poles Reveal their Secrets - Alastair Dennistons's Account of the July 1939 Meeting at Pyry . Cryptologia. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 30.2006,4, p. 294
  4. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer : Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 , p. 412.
  5. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 230. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
personal data
SURNAME Twinn, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Twinn, Peter Frank George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician and cryptologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 2004