The technology is more than 75 years old, but that’s not dampening the enthusiasm a small group of Radford students have for their upcoming trip to London’s Bletchley Park, where during World War II, British codebreakers cracked what German engineers thought was their unbreakable Enigma enciphering machine.
“This is a World War II-themed trip centered around cryptography,” explained Neil Sigmon, a professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics who teaches the London-bound students in a cryptography course. “We are going on this study abroad trip with a point of emphasis being the work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.”
Before flying across the Atlantic Ocean, the 12 globetrotting students will visit the National Cryptologic Museum and the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Once in London, the group plans to visit the Churchill War Rooms, the HMS Belfast warship, the Imperial War Museums “and many other sites,” Sigmon said.
Later, the group will visit the D-Day invasion site in Normandy, France, and make a brief stop in Paris.
To prepare for the trip, the class has been meeting twice a week, Sigmon noted, “to learn about cryptology in general, how the German Enigma cipher worked, and to introduce how the Turing Bombe, the mechanical device the codebreakers used to break the Enigma machine, worked.”
The cryptography course has a diverse group of majors, from the expected, mathematics, cybersecurity and criminal justice – to the unexpected.
Tessa Harmon fits in the latter group. The junior from Lebanon, Virginia, is double majoring in biology and theatre. She developed an interest in World War II in a middle school history course. “Ever since, I haven’t been able to get enough information about it,” and that’s the reason, she said, she enrolled in Sigmon’s course. “Plus, he is such a welcoming person,” Harmon said of her professor.
Adam Downs chose to enroll in the course and his majors – mathematics and cybersecurity – in order to pursue a career in cryptology.
“I am especially interested in the cryptanalysis of the Enigma machine,” said the senior from Riner, Virginia. “Though it is now obsolete as a cipher, studying the processes used to break the machine can still provide useful insights in modern times. Some of the most popular encryption schemes today are based on theorems from hundreds of years ago.”
Chad Osborne for Radford University
