Mathematical Careers
David Saltman
Center for Communications Research - IDA
Breaking Enigma the First Time
Abstract: I have two goals in this talk. The first one is to give you some idea of what it is like
to work at my center and more generally in the community we are part of. The second
goal is to give you some idea about how useful and important our kind of work is.
Now both goals are obstructed because our work is classified. For the first, I will give some
idea of how we work, if not what we do. For the second, I will give a historical example
describing how the Poles in World War II broke the German Enigma machine, and some of the math involved. As part of this section of the talk, I will invite you to examine and operate a original Enigma machine.
Friday February 22, 2019 at 3:00 PM in 636 SEO