Designer of Bletchley Park's Bombe cryptanalytic machine
Posthumously, the most famous alumnus of Bletchley Park, Alan Turing was recruited in 1938 and, after taking part in some specially devised courses, joined Bletchley Park in September 1939.
He met Polish counterparts in Paris in January 1940, a meeting at which they gave him the insights he needed to build on their foundations by designing the Bombe. This was the first special-purpose cryptanalytic machine, and made major contributions to the exploitation of German Naval Enigma, before moving on to work on secure speech systems.
After the war, working at Manchester University, he and Max Newman, another BP mathematician, led a team that produced Britain's first general-purpose stored programme computer (the Ferranti Mk 1).
