As Marcus du Sautoy OBE, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, said this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, ‘codes go to the heart of what people love: cracking puzzles’.
Prof du Sautoy was on the programme to talk about the American FBI’s recent appeal for the public to help crack two codes found on a piece of paper inside the pocket of a murdered man, almost twelve years ago. The 41-year-old Ricky McCormick was found in a Missouri cornfield in June 1999, yet despite years of detective work by experts at the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Unit and the American Cryptogram Association, the codes remain unbroken. Hence the move to ‘crowd-source’ the codes, in the hope that somewhere a mathematically-minded individual will succeed in deciphering the messages.
So where are the Bletchley Park codebreakers when we need them? How did they succeed in cracking the German Enigma ciphers during the Second World War (a feat which, some suggest, shortened the duration of WWII by up to two years)? Who was Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox? And how would he and his team approach McCormick’s codes?
To help you answer these questions, and to give you a better chance of cracking the code currently flummoxing the FBI, Biteback would like to suggest the following books, each priced just £9.99: The Bletchley Park Codebreakers by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine; The Emperor’s Codes: Bletchley Park’s role in breaking Japan’s secret ciphers by Michael Smith; and Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas by Mavis Batey.
Happy codebreaking!
