The Erudite Platypus
April Birthday/Events in the Field of CS/Cryptology
3 April
Birthday of Alec Naylor Dakin. He worked in Hut 4 at Bletchley Park.
Birthday of Solomon Kullback, an American cryptanalyst. He helped develop the Kullback-Leibler divergence.
6 April
Birthday for Fritz Menzer whose work focused on the development and production of cryptographic devices and procedures at OKW/Chi.
10 April
Birthday of Augustus the Younger, author of the standard reference for cryptology "Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae libri IX"
12 April
Birthday of David Harel. Dr. Harel is best known for his work on dynamic logic, computability, database theory, software engineering and modeling biological systems. The inventor of the graphical language of Statecharts for specifying and programming reactive systems, which has been adopted as part of the UML standard.
Event: In 1889, the Army's Military Information Division was formerly authorized.
13 April
Birthday of Herbert Yardly, an American cryptologist and founder of the Black Chamber.
Birthday of Thomas Jefferson (yes, THAT Thomas Jefferson). President Jefferson was an active cryptologist and even invented the Jefferson Wheel to help encrypt and decrypt messages.
17 April
Birthday of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin used coding languages for much of his correspondence.
19 April
Birthday of Fred Brooks. An American computer scientist who is known for "Brooks Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
21 April
Birthday for Cristian S. Calude, a Romanian-New Zealander mathematician and computer scientist. Published author/co-author for more than 270 papers and cited in over 500 papers.
26 April
Birthday of Herman Maurer, an Austrian computer scientist who has influenced the field of computer science as a mentor and educator. Author of more than 20 books and over 600 scientific articles in the field.
30 April
Birthday of Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein helped decipher the Japanese machine Purple and worked on the Verona Project during the Cold War.
Birthday of Claude Shannon, an American cryptographer. Shannon is known as the Father of Information Theory.
