1. Elonka Dunin is an American video game developer and cryptologist.
16 Facts About Elonka Dunin
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Elonka Dunin was born in Santa Monica, California, the older of two children to Stanley Elonka Dunin, a Polish-American mathematician, and Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dance ethnologist at UCLA.
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Elonka Dunin graduated in 1976 from University High School, and then enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA, but dropped out near the end of her freshman year.
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Elonka Dunin joined the United States Air Force, working as an avionics technician at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom and Beale Air Force Base in California.
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In 1990, Elonka Dunin moved to St Louis and began working for the online game company Simutronics.
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Elonka Dunin was the product manager for GemStone III, executive producer for the Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess-based multiplayer game Alliance of Heroes, and worked in a variety of production and development roles on most of Simutronics' other products, including CyberStrike, Modus Operandi, DragonRealms, HeroEngine, Fantasy University, and Tiny Heroes.
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Elonka Dunin held a variety of production and development roles during her 24 years at Simutronics.
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Elonka Dunin has written books and articles about cryptography, and been interviewed on radio and television about related subjects such as Kryptos, the Smithy Code, and Ricky McCormick's encrypted notes.
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In 2003, Elonka Dunin organized a team which solved the ciphers on Kryptos's sister sculpture, the Cyrillic Projector.
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When Kryptos sculptor Jim Sanborn chose to release information about an error on the sculpture in 2006, he contacted Elonka Dunin to make the announcement.
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In July 2007, Elonka Dunin appeared on the PBS program NOVA scienceNOW, as an expert on Kryptos, and in 2009, contributed two articles about the sculpture for the book Secrets of The Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel, a companion book to author Dan Brown's novel The Lost Symbol.
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Elonka Dunin had assisted Brown with the research for the novel, and Brown named a character in the novel after her.
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In 2006, Elonka Dunin compiled a book of several hundred exercises in classical cryptography, which was published in the United States as The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, and in the UK as The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles.
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Elonka Dunin has given talks on Kryptos and the Cyrillic Projector at the National Security Agency's Cryptologic History Symposium, Def Con, Shmoocon, Notacon, PhreakNIC, and Dragon*Con, and has given lectures at the International Game Developers Conference.
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Elonka Dunin has been invited to be a co-host on the Binary Revolution webcast three times.
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Elonka Dunin is a Wikipedia editor who has made tens of thousands of edits.