William Friedman

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William Friedman

William Frederick Friedman (born September 24, 1891 in Chișinău , Russian Empire , today Moldova as Wolf Fridman ; † November 12, 1969 in Washington, DC ) was a Russian-American cryptologist . Shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, he founded the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) , a secret division of the US military that mainly dealt with the deciphering of enemy messages.

Life

The married couple William and Elizebeth Friedman in later years

Friedman's father was a translator for the Russian Post and emigrated to the USA in 1892, where the family followed in 1893. The family initially resided in Pittsburgh, and when the father became a US citizen in 1896, Wolfe Friedman became William Friedman. Friedman studied genetics at Cornell University with a bachelor's degree and then worked at Riverbank Laboratories near Chicago, a private think tank founded in the 1910s by the successful American entrepreneur George Fabyan (1867-1936) . It was there that he began to work with cryptography and he became acquainted with Elizebeth Smith , who was also a cryptanalyst at Riverbank, and who shortly afterwards became his wife  (picture) . From the First World War he was a cryptologist in the service of the US government.

The term cryptography was largely coined by William Friedman. He developed a statistical method, the Friedman test and the coincidence index , in order to examine encrypted texts for linguistic properties and in particular to determine the key lengths. His method was published in 1920. It was also used in linguistics and in the deciphering of historical written documents.

William Friedman was instrumental in the deciphering of encrypted military messages during World War II. He also tried his hand at deciphering the Voynich manuscript together with a team of 16 specialists . After a year, however, this attempt was terminated without any results.

Friedman also belonged to a group of mathematicians who succeeded in overcoming the so-called Purple coding method used by the Japanese.

In 1946 he received the Medal for Merit , at that time the highest civilian honor in the USA.

Posthumous honor

William Friedman in the Hall of Honor picture gallery (top row far left)

In 1999, William Friedman was inducted into the Hall of Honor (German: Ehrenhalle) of the National Security Agency NSA.

Works

  • William Friedman and Charles J. Mendelsohn : The Zimmermann Telegram of January 16, 1917 and its Cryptographic Background . War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Washington, GPO, 1938

literature

Web links