Goodbyes

We’d like to thank everyone who’s played along so far and anyone who may stumble across our creation in the future.  Thank you for your time and your effort as it has validated our own. At this point some will have found the final answer and others will be stumped but hopefully no one has […]

Oscar Wilde

The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.

Edward Scheidt

Edward M. Scheidt (born 1939) is the retired Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, and the designer of the cryptographic systems on the Kryptos sculpture at the center of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Scheidt was born in 1939 in California. His father worked for the government, and his mother was a switchboard operator at […]

Giovanni Soro

Giovanni Soro (died 1544) was a Venetian professional code-cracker. He was more than likely the Renaissance’s first outstanding cryptanalyst and the Western world’s first great cryptanalyst. Soro is known as the father of modern cryptography. Soro was employed in Venice in 1506 by the Council of Ten as cipher breaker-in-chief. They were the first secret […]

Conel Alexander

Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, CMG, CBE (19 April 1909 – 15 February 1974) was an Irish-born British cryptanalyst, chess player, and chess writer. He worked on the German Enigma machine at Bletchley Park during World War II, and was later the head of the cryptanalysis division at GCHQ for over 20 years. In chess, he […]

Al-Kindi

Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī (Arabic: أبو يوسف يعقوب إبن إسحاق الكندي‎) (c. 801–873 CE), also known to the West by the Latinized version of his name Alkindus, was an Arab Iraqi polymath: an Islamic philosopher, scientist, astrologer, astronomer, cosmologist, chemist, logician, mathematician, musician, physician, physicist, psychologist, and meteorologist. Al-Kindi was the first of […]

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (pronounced /ˈtjʊərɪŋ/, TYOOR-ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was influential in the development of computer science and provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. In 1999, Time Magazine named […]

William Friedman

William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 – November 12, 1969) was a US Army cryptographer (or cryptologist depending on preference). He ran the research division of the Army’s Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s. In the late 1930s, subordinates of his led by Frank Rowlett […]

Friedrich Kasiski

Major Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski (29 November 1805–22 May 1881) was a Prussian infantry officer, cryptographer and archeologist. Kasiski was born in Schlochau, West Prussia. Kasiski enlisted in East Prussia’s 33rd Infantry Regiment on 20 March, 1823 at the age of 17. In May 1824, he was promoted to the rank of Master Sergeant, and eight […]

Marian Rejewski

Marian Adam Rejewski 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in 1932 solved the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany. The success of Rejewski and his colleagues Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski jump-started British reading of Enigma in World War II; the intelligence so […]