Saturday, June 24, 2017

Joan Clarke (1917-1996)

I'm in San Francisco for the ACM conference celebrating 50 years of the Turing Award. I'll post on STOC and the Turing award celebration next week. Today though we remember another member of Bletchley Park, Joan Clarke, born one hundred years ago today, five years and a day after Turing.

Clarke became one of the leading cryptoanalysts at Bletchley Park during the second World War. She mastered the technique of Banburismus developed by Alan Turing, the only woman to do so, to help break German codes. Bletchley Park promoted her to linguist, even though she didn't know any languages, to partially compensate for a lower pay scale for woman at the time. Keira Knightly played Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game.

Joan Clarke had a close friendship with Turing and a brief engagement. In this video Joan Clarke talks about that time in her life.

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