WWII code breaker Mary Ratcliffe has died

Indeed - the Enigma decoding machines at Bletchley were the evolution of earlier designs, two iterations at least that came from the Poles.

I mentioned Tutte as Bletchley can take full credit for the inhouse reverse engineering and attacks on Tunny, the Lorenz cipher, a more difficult cipher than Enigma and one used for more sensitive traffic by the Germans.

Tunny had an entirely seperate dedicated class of machines used for its attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

    Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

But does the Hollywood movie about Touring mention it? No, it doesn't, and you know why? Because none of the Polish mathematicians who did the actual work were gay.

The Daily Heil, as it’s often referred to, was and still is frequently on the wrong side of history.

Pushed for closer relations with Hitler, encouraged people to vote for UKIP, pushed for Brexit, frequently writes literally-proved-in-court lies and slander, the list is long.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail

The NYT was telling us that the Holodomor was a lie around the same time, and their Moscow correspondent (Walter Durant) won a Pulitzer for it. So we should probably ignore them too if a paper's opinions from the 1930s are still relevant.

On HN, we go by article quality, not site quality. This looks like a good enough article. Lots of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Here's an account from another WRNS P5.

https://bletchleypark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/record_attac...

Sounds like they did the manual work of running the Bombe machines.

Was she a scientist? I didn't know her, and after reading this, admittedly short, article it doesn't look like she was doing much more than technician work.

The article didn't say she was a scientist. There were also technicians. It's unclear.

I said there may be more detailed bios published. I was unable to find much under her name.

That is an odd article you've linked to. There seems to be several factors in play.

1. People observe that there is a disparity in the number of pages on Wikipedia about men and women in science. 2. This leads to a number of people searching out people to write about that would redress the balance. 3. Unfortunately some are really only notable for their gender and/or ethnicity, and Wikipedia does not view that as a factor. 4. Hence, a lot of these pages get flagged for deletion.

The discrepancy is largely a reflection of our history. Until recently women and non-white ethnicities weren't in positions of scientific research. With fewer people in the field, there will be fewer notable people even if the chance of one person being notable is the same. It sounds like the "deletion of female scientists" is the system working correctly in response to people submitting articles for reasons other than refection the historical truth.

I'm sure there are cases of someone having their contribution ignored due to racism/sexism, but artifically inflating the achievements of people just to redress some perceived imbalance doesn't help. Now another person gets credit they don't deserve whilst the true talent gets buried deeper.

Between WW2 and the Korean War my grandpa was in the army. He was assigned to transcribe intercepted Soviet telegraphs on a typewriter which would then be passed on to the actual codebreakers. His work was probably useful and helpful to our efforts to oppose the USSR, but he never considered his work more important than that of the actual codebreakers, which he thought was much more difficult and required much more talent/ability. And he didn't consider himself more important than all the other guys in his unit doing the same transcription work as him.

I've noticed that for almost every example of "important historical female/minority/whatever" that gets promoted as being forgotten or overlooked there are dozens if not hundreds of straight white men with the same achievements if not greater. The ones that did standout things that actually make them memorable tend to be, y'know, remembered. The outright lies that get shared (like traffic lights being invented by a black man) just make it even more insulting.