THE TIMES OBITUARY - Peter Twinn

Just for the record - there is another obituary from THE TIMES :


THE TIMES
November 24, 2004

OBITUARY - Peter Twinn
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Mathematician and codebreaker at Blethcley Park who became the first
Briton to unravel a German Enigma message

THE mathematician Peter Twinn became the first British cryptographer to
decipher a message encoded by a German Enigma coding machine while he was
working at the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park
during the Second World War.../snip/


...About 10,000 people worked at Bletchley. The core group was the small
number of cryptanalysts trying to crack the Enigma machine; at the
beginning, this group consisted of no more than ten people, with Knox and
Twinn in charge.

The British codebreakers had been working on the commercial version of
Enigma, the easier of the two to break, during the 1920s and 1930s, and
they had made much progress in breaking the military version. But Twinn
and his colleagues were stymied because they could not work out the order
in which the Enigma keys were wired up.

In July 1939, a month or so before the war started, Knox and some others
travelled to Poland. Polish cryptologists, some of whom were brilliant,
handed over to their British colleagues key information about Enigma,
including replica machines.

The British discovered that Enigma machines were wired alphabetically: A
to the first contact, B to the second, and so on. This was the order given
in the diagram attached to the patent application. But Twinn and his
colleagues thought it such an obvious thing to do that nobody considered
it worth trying.

In early 1940 Twinn made the first break into Enigma. This could have been
done much earlier if only they had tried the alphabetical system detailed
in the patent application.

The ability to read German encoded military messages was of inestimable
help to the Allies in winning the war. It was achieved largely because of
the efforts of Twinn, Knox, Alan Turing (who later became the father of
artificial intelligence) and others at Bletchley Park. Turing, a brilliant
mathematician, developed a machine called the bombe, which speeded up the
deciphering process by trial and error  a crucial development for the
codebreakers.

Twinn worked with Turing on breaking the German Naval Enigma. Their
success helped allied convoys to avoid German U-boats. Knox worked on the
German Army (Abwehr) codes, a task that Twinn took over when Knox became
ill. This operation was crucial in the Allied campaign to deceive the
Germans about their plans to invade Normandy in June 1944. The work of
GC&CS, however, remained one of Britains best-kept secrets until 1974,
nearly 30 years after the end of the war.

After the war ended, Twinn worked for the Ministry of Technology, becoming
director of hovercraft. He served in other government departments before
being appointed Secretary of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE),
Farnborough.

While at Farnborough, he became seriously interested in insects, using
RAEs sophisticated cameras to photograph them. He took a doctorate in
entomology at London University, researching the jumping mechanism of the
click beetle. In 1999 he co-wrote A Provisional Atlas of the Longhorn
Beetle of Britain, which is still a standard reference book on the
subject. He was also an accomplished musician on the clarinet and the
viola.

Twinn had a rare gift for painstaking and meticulous work, the most
important ability for a first-class codebreaker. He was a very modest man
who continually played down his crucial contributions to Britains war
effort.

His wife, three daughters and a son survive him.

Peter Twinn, codebreaker, mathematician and entomologist, was born on
January 9, 1916. He died on October 29, 2004, aged 88.


see :   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1371653,00.html
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