Cryptologic Bytes

"On This Date in History" Calendar

1907: Cryptologic pioneer Solomon Kullback was born.

Monday, April 3, 2023

3 April 1907: Dr. Solomon Kullback - cryptologic pioneer, mathematician, and teacher was born. Inducted into the NSA/CSS Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 1999 (see link at end of page).

Dr. Kullback was one of the first three employees hired by William F. Friedman at the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, along with Frank Rowlett and Abraham Sinkov. The original members of SIS were a unique quartet, men who ought to be national heroes. Their love was as much for the process as the result, the cryptanalysis as the intelligence derived from it, but what they did, the breakthroughs against the high-level code and cipher systems of our principal enemies, surely shortened the period of war by many months and resulted in the saving of thousands of American and British lives.

Dr. Kullback enjoyed a long and distinguished career at SIS and its eventual successor, the National Security Agency. Kullback was the Chief Scientist at the NSA until his retirement in 1962, whereupon he took a position at the George Washington University.

Dr. Kullback was inducted into the NSA/CSS Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 1999. Read the full entry about his career and accomplishments via the link below.

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