Who Is Described in the Scientist's Letter?

[plover]

Well, to be honest, I thought like this:
"Ok, he said someone was incredibly close; that's probably the Ada Lovelace answer.
Now, it would defy all odds that the answer is Babbage (besides, I didn't manage to hook Babbage up to any of the mentioned persons), so it's probably some woman.."
(It's true I DID think of Babbage, but dismissed him )

After Gokul's response I assumed the answer almost had to be Babbage. I would have guessed him, but I thought I was barred from guessing again.

The first guess was pretty much luck. While the names Vigenere and Wheatstone looked familiar, I couldn't remember any associations for them. The other two were poets, but given that this was a science quiz, I figured I needed someone associated with science, and Ada was the scientific personage most closely associated with either of them that I could think of.

But I still defy anyone to find a Wheaties box (or even some kind of Victorian proto-Weetabix box) with Byron on it (let alone Vigenere) ...

 

[selfAdjoint]

Vignere and Wheatstone have ciphers named after them, there has to be a clue there somehow!

 

[Gokul43201]

Wow, sA - you've resurrected an oldie (although I imagine you were lead here by my link in the other thread)!

Yes, that is where the connection lies. The answer I was looking for is Charles Babbage (a cryptanalyst of no modest ability himself) - see post #25.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Is that true, that Babbage was the first to solve a vignere (polyalphabetic) cipher? Who says?

 

[Gokul43201]

Is that true, that Babbage was the first to solve a vignere (polyalphabetic) cipher? Who says?

Google gives me these (among other hits):

Friedrich Kasiski published the first successful attack on the Vigenère cipher in 1863, but Charles Babbage had already developed the same test in 1854. Babbage was goaded into breaking the Vigenère cipher when John Hall Brock Thwaites submitted a "new" cipher to the Journal of the Society of the Arts: when Babbage showed that Thwaites' cipher was essentially just another recreation of the Vigenère cipher Thwaites grew irritated and challenged Babbage to break his cipher. Babbage tried to get out of it, but eventually gave in and succeded in decrypting a sample, which turned out to be the poem "The Vision of Sin," by Alfred Tennyson, encrypted according to the keyword "Emily," the first name of Tennyson's wife[5].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenere_cipherMy original source, however, was likely Simon Singh.

 

[neutrino]

Babbage was the first to crack the Vigenere Cipher;

Wheatstone & Babbage were close buddies, often spending weekeds together decrypting private messages in the 'personals' columns of local newspapers...along with Lyon Playfair, the 3 created the Playfair Cipher;

Babbage once sent Tennyson a letter complaining about lines in a poem that went "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born". Babbage wrote "...if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest in the next edition of your poem, you have it read 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one and one-sixteenth is born'."

Arrgghh! Now I remember reading about all that in Simon Singh's The Code Book. Anyway, I look at these trivia threads long after most of the questions have been answered.

Thanks for all that trivia, Gokul.