page_title: Shaun Wylie
section_title: World War II codebreaking
hierarchical_section_title: Shaun Wylie / World War II codebreaking
caption_attribution_description: English: Two Enigma rotors and the spindle on which they are mounted. When the machine is assembled, the spring-loaded studs on the right hand side of rotor (pictured left), make electrical contact with the brass contacts on the left hand side of the rotor (pictured right). The rotor to the left shows the tooth-edged rachet of the stepping mechanism. The notch adjacent to the letter 'D' on the rotor to the right, allows the pawl of the stepping mechanism to fall into place to advance the rotor to its left.
context_page_description: Shaun Wylie was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.
context_section_description: During World War II, Turing had been recruited to work at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. Turing wrote to Wylie around December 1940, who was by then teaching at Wellington College, inviting him to work at Bletchley Park. He accepted, and arrived in February 1941. He joined Turing's section, Hut 8, which was working on solving the Enigma machine as used by the Kriegsmarine. He became head of the crib subsection, and allocated time on the bombe codebreaking machines.Hugh Alexander, successor to Turing as head of Hut 8, commented that "except for Turing, no-one made a bigger contribution to the success of Hut 8 than Shaun Wylie; he was astonishingly quick and resourceful and contributed to theory and practice in a number of different directions".
  Wylie transferred in Autumn 1943 to work on "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher. He married Odette Murray, a WREN in the section. In 1945, soon after the victory in Europe, Wylie demonstrated how Colossus — electronic machines used to help solve Tunny — could have been used unmodified to break the Tunny "motor wheels", a task which had been previously done by hand. While at Bletchley Park, he became president of the dramatic club. He had also played international hockey for Scotland, but according to fellow codebreaker I. J. Good, he "never mentioned any of his successes".
caption: Wylie contributed to the breaking of the Enigma machine code.
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