Presentation – Year 12, Chris Davis

Chris’ presentation was on the cryptography and mathematics involved in the enigma machine and the German codes.

After an introduction which took us through the historic context of the enigma, Chris used diagrams to show how the cipher wheels of the machine worked and why the code was so difficult to break. He talked about the reverse wiring needed to make the enigma both an encoder and decoder as opposed to having two separate machines, a design factor that when combined with operator error led to the code being broken by the Polish. Thank you Chris for a very interesting talk.