I've seen several documentaries on the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park. At one point I almost understood it

I'm tempted to go to a lecture on it in Harrogate - this is what it says in the blurb:

The UK’s leading authority on World War II intelligence, Dr Baldwin gives an illustrated talk about the legendary Enigma machine and the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park followed by a hands-on demonstration.

I gather Dr Baldwin has given several lectures on it around the country. Has anyone ever been to any of the others to know whether the lecture is "accessible" to non-mathematicians?

I don't know about Dr. Baldwin, but the wikipedia page is excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine

Compared to modern encryption methods both the implementation and the mathematics behind it in "Enigma" are simple and primitive. The algortithm is also flawed - although the basic idea of rotors is used in modern algorithms and emulated in many modern programs that implement them.

I would say that the way the Enigma machine actually works is able to be understood by most clear thinking people, and does not need a knowledge of mathematics. The difficult bit comes in when you try to understand how the code breakers used their knowledge of how it works, together with the fact that no letter could be encoded as itself, their knowledge of the war and weather conditions prevailing at the time, who the likely sender might be, aids to code-cracking, operator blunders, and inspired guesswork to actually come up with a decrypt setting from which to discover the plain letter text from the coded text.
Incidentally, I took my brother to Bletchley Park just last Monday and for us it was a fascinating day out. Well worth a visit if you find the Enigma story interesting.

That's an excellent web site, thanks. I followed some of the links, and ended up finding out the name of the original documentary which first interested me in the Enigma and Bletchley Park... it was a Channel 4 mini-series in 1999 called "Station X - the Codebreakers of Bletchley Park" - there was an accompanying book which I've just ordered.



Yes it looks a fascinating place