William Gordon Welchman was a British mathematician.
18 Facts About Gordon Welchman
2.
Gordon Welchman was born, the youngest of three children, at Fishponds in Bristol, to William Welchman and Elizabeth Marshall Griffith.
3.
Gordon Welchman became a Fellow in 1932, and later Dean of the College.
4.
Just before World War II, Gordon Welchman was invited by Commander Alastair Denniston to join the Government Code and Cypher School in the event of war.
5.
Gordon Welchman was one of four early recruits to BP, the others being Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander, and Stuart Milner-Barry.
6.
Gordon Welchman became head of Hut Six, the section at BP responsible for breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma ciphers.
7.
Gordon Welchman invented the "Diagonal Board", an addition which made the British Bombe immensely more powerful.
8.
Gordon Welchman left Hut Six in 1943, to become Assistant Director for Mechanization.
9.
Gordon Welchman had responsibility for cryptographic liaison with the US, which constructed and used additional bombes.
10.
Gordon Welchman was responsible for making sure that the British and American bombes were not wastefully working on the same keys, and that all solutions by one group were reported to the other group.
11.
Gordon Welchman was awarded the OBE in the 1944 King's Birthday Honours list.
12.
Gordon Welchman taught the first computer programming course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, and Frank Heart was among his students.
13.
Gordon Welchman followed this by employment with Remington Rand and Ferranti.
14.
Gordon Welchman retired in 1971, but was retained as a consultant.
15.
The book was not banned, but as a result of it, Gordon Welchman lost his American and British security clearances, and therefore his consultancy with Mitre, and was forbidden to discuss either the book or his wartime work.
16.
In 1937 Gordon Welchman married Katharine Hodgson, a professional musician, the daughter of Francis Faith Hodgson, who was a captain in the Indian Army.
17.
In 1959 Gordon Welchman divorced Katharine and married the American Cubist painter Fannie Hillsmith.
18.
Gordon Welchman was the subject of a BBC documentary in 2015.