20 Facts About IJ Good

Irving John IJ Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing.

IJ Good moved to the United States where he was professor at Virginia Tech.

IJ Good was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a Polish Jewish family in London.

An originator of the concept now known as "intelligence explosion, " IJ Good served as consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick, director of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

IJ Good was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to Polish Jewish parents in London.

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IJ Good's father was a watchmaker, who later managed and owned a successful fashionable jewellery shop, and was a notable Yiddish writer writing under the pen name of Moshe Oved.

IJ Good was educated at the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, at the time in Hampstead in northwest London, where, according to Dan van der Vat, IJ Good effortlessly outpaced the mathematics curriculum.

IJ Good studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938 and winning the Smith's Prize in 1940.

On 27 May 1941, having just obtained his doctorate at Cambridge, IJ Good walked into Hut 8, Bletchley's facility for breaking German naval ciphers, for his first shift.

At first, Turing thought IJ Good was ill, but he was cross when IJ Good explained that he was just taking a short nap because he was tired.

IJ Good wondered if their choice of dummy letters was random, or whether there was a bias towards particular letters.

When IJ Good mentioned his discovery to Alan Turing, Turing was very embarrassed, and said, 'I could have sworn that I tried that.

In 1948 IJ Good was recruited by the Government Communications Headquarters, successor to Bletchley Park.

IJ Good remained there until 1959, while taking up a brief associate professorship at Princeton University and a short consultancy with IBM.

From 1959 until he moved to the US in 1967, IJ Good held government-funded positions and from 1964 a senior research fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford, and the Atlas Computer Laboratory, where he continued his interests in computing, statistics and chess.

In 1967 IJ Good moved to the United States, where he was appointed a research professor of statistics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

IJ Good later said about his arrival in Virginia in 1967 to start teaching at VPI, where he taught from 1967 to 1994:.

IJ Good played chess to county standard and helped popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist .

In 1995 IJ Good was elected a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

IJ Good died on 5 April 2009 of natural causes in Radford, Virginia, aged 92.