31 Facts About Marian Rejewski

Marian Rejewski's contributions included the cryptologic card catalog and the cryptologic bomb.

Marian Rejewski was born 16 August 1905 in Bromberg in the Prussian Province of Posen to Jozef and Matylda, nee Thoms.

The course was conducted off-campus at a military facility and, as Marian Rejewski would discover in France in 1939, "was entirely and literally based" on a 1925 book by French colonel Marcel Givierge, Cours de cryptographie.

On 1 March 1929, Marian Rejewski graduated with a Master of Philosophy degree in mathematics.

Marian Rejewski did not complete the statistics course, because while home for the summer of 1930, he accepted an offer, from Professor Krygowski, of a mathematics teaching assistantship at Poznan University.

Marian Rejewski began working part-time for the Cipher Bureau, which by then had set up an outpost at Poznan to decrypt intercepted German radio messages.

Marian Rejewski worked some twelve hours a week near the Mathematics Institute in an underground vault referred to puckishly as the "Black Chamber".

On 20 June 1934 Marian Rejewski married Irena Maria Lewandowska, daughter of a prosperous dentist.

Marian Rejewski had only the first at his disposal, based on information already acquired by the Cipher Bureau.

At this point, Marian Rejewski ran into difficulties due to the large number of unknowns in the set of equations that he had developed.

The military Enigma had been modified from the commercial Enigma, of which Marian Rejewski had had an actual example to study.

Marian Rejewski, perhaps guided by an intuition about a German fondness for order, simply guessed that the wiring was the normal alphabetic ordering.

Marian Rejewski recalled in 1980 that another way had been found that could have been used to solve the wirings, but that the method was "imperfect and tedious" and relied on chance.

Marian Rejewski describes the construction of the Zygalski mechanism and its manipulation:.

Marian Rejewski's cover was as Pierre Ranaud, a lycee professor from Nantes.

Marian Rejewski was discharged from the Polish Army in Britain on 15 November 1946.

Marian Rejewski could have looked forward to rapid advancement because of personnel shortages as a result of the war.

Marian Rejewski took a position in Bydgoszcz as director of the sales department at a cable-manufacturing company, Kabel Polski.

Between 1949 and 1958 Marian Rejewski was repeatedly investigated by the Polish Office of Public Security, who suspected he was a former member of the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

Marian Rejewski retired in 1967, and moved with his family back to Warsaw in 1969, to an apartment he had acquired 30 years earlier with financial help from his father-in-law.

Marian Rejewski had written a "Report of Cryptologic Work on the German Enigma Machine Cipher" in 1942.

Marian Rejewski had often wondered what use Alan Turing and the British at Bletchley Park had ultimately made of the Polish discoveries and inventions.

Marian Rejewski fought a gallant fight to get the truth before the public.

Marian Rejewski published a number of papers on his cryptologic work and contributed generously to articles, books, and television programs.

Marian Rejewski was interviewed by scholars, journalists, and television crews from Poland, East Germany, the United States, Britain, Sweden, Belgium, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Brazil.

Marian Rejewski maintained a lively correspondence with his wartime French host, General Gustave Bertrand, and at the General's bidding he began translating Bertrand's Enigma into Polish.

Marian Rejewski, who had been suffering from heart disease, died of a heart attack on 13 February 1980, aged 74, after returning home from a shopping trip.

Marian Rejewski was buried with military honors at Warsaw's Powazki Military Cemetery.

On 1 August 2012 Marian Rejewski posthumously received the Knowlton Award of the US Military Intelligence Corps Association; his daughter Janina accepted the award at his home town, Bydgoszcz, on 4 September 2012.

Marian Rejewski had been nominated for the Award by NATO Allied Command Counterintelligence.

In 2021 the Enigma Cipher Centre, an educational and scientific institution dedicated to the Polish mathematicians who broke the Enigma cipher, including Marian Rejewski, opened in Poznan.