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Gordon Welchman Research Paper

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There are so many mathematicians in the world, and so many of them have applied their knowledge to our everyday world. We take a lot of things for granted. We use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division almost daily, but do we know who created those functions? Finding these little things can lead to greater inventions, and with a little bit of research, we can explore these wondrous creations in depth. Let us look at a very important mathematician named William Gordon Welchman.

Welchman was born on June 15, 1906 in Bristol, England (3), and he was the youngest of three children. His father was William Welchman, and his mother was named Elizabeth Marshall Griffith (3.). Gordon was married Fannie Hillsmith, and had three children, …show more content…

Welchman graduated in 1928 and was elected as Research Fellow in Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge a year later (2). William became an author in 1932 when he published Foci of Systems of Spaces (3). Welchman became an archdeacon of Bristol before he started making a difference in the world. He became the Junior Dean and Tutor at Sidney Sussex College during World War II (2)

Later on, Gordon was invited to Bletchley Park by a man named Alastair Denniston, who was working on a machine called the Enigma Machine. The Enigma Machine looks like a typewriter, and was used for communication between the military. It was used during World War II by the British to decode the German signals (5). Denniston was having trouble with the Enigma Machine since the German had made it more complicated, so Denniston put together some people to form the Government Code and Cypher School (1). The group was called GCCS (1), and it included a man named Alan Turing, and of course, …show more content…

William perfected this by turning it into something called a diagonal board. Finally, Alex finalized this invention and it because a sort of cabinet, which they called The Bombe. This invention later became known as the Turing-Welchman Bombe.

Gordon continued to work in Bletchley Park. He knew that the cryptographers had to be close, and they needed increased facilities while Turing was working on The Bombe. After World War II in 1948, Welchman moved to the United States, and taught computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). That same year, Gordon worked on the secure communication in the US military, and retired in 1971.

In 1982, Welchman published another book, called The Hut Six Story (1), which revealed Bletchley Park and the work he and Turing had done there. Hardly anyone had known about their invention, and now that it was out in the open, the NSA did not approve. They did not want the organization of Hut six to be known, so they forbade Welchman to speak of his creation, however the book was not banned (1). Unfortunately, Welchman’s security clearance was taken away, and he could no longer work as an advisor for the military

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