Description

Edited by Yannis Galanakis, Anastasia Christophilopoulou and James Grime. 144 pages with back and white and colour illustrations. Secret texts and writing have an old-age fascination. In this book two stories are told:of the people who worked on breaking vital codes in the Second World War and those who deciphered the Linear B script - Europe’s earliest comprehensible writing system. Here experts in the fields of Mycenaean epigraphy and the study of the Aegean Bronze Age join with fellow specialists in mathematics, cryptography and the history of the computer. They show how collaboration between people with a wide range of expertise in disparate fields can result in great discoveries, whether they are mathematicians or linguists, or just good at puzzles! Both groups of pioneer codebreakers needed original thinkers and the stories of those involved, especially Alan Turing and Dillwyn Knox at Bletchley Park and Michael Ventris and john Chadwick in Cambridge, are told here.