Poland's Enigma code-breakers posthumously honoured in Warsaw
PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle
06.08.2014 15:01
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NFP 14 08 06 Milestone Award for Polish mathematicians.mp3
The internationally prestigious Milestone Award has been granted posthumously to three Polish mathematicians who broke the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII, a breakthrough that shortened the war.
Janina Sylwestrzak, daughter of the late code-breaker Marian Rejewski, during the ceremony. At Polish Academy of Sciences: photo - PAP / Rafał Guz
As Slawek Szefs reports, the late Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski have been included in a pantheon of world famous names such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell or Nikola Tesla, to be honoured by the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the world's largest professional association grouping some 440,000 members in 160 countries.
"Thanks to their achievement the Second World War was shortened by two or three years. This meant saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” Professor Ryszard Jachowicz from the Polish chapter of IEEE said at the Milestone Award ceremony, where a plaque to the three Polish code-breakers memory was unveilled at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.