Lambros Callimahos
More info
- Lived
- 1910–1977
- Known for
- Military Cryptanalytics, the CA-400 course
A concert flautist who became the NSA's most influential teacher of cryptanalysis.
Callimahos had a career as a solo flautist in Europe and the US before enlisting in 1941 and landing in the Army's codebreaking operation. There he became a pupil and then close collaborator of William Friedman, and the two reworked Friedman's textbooks into the Military Cryptanalytics series, which stayed classified for decades.
At the NSA he built CA-400, a notoriously hard intensive course in cryptanalysis. Those who passed joined the Dundee Society, named after the jar of Dundee marmalade in which Callimahos kept his pencils. Few cryptologists have shaped so many successors that nobody was allowed to hear about.