Individual Post Archive
« Spies big winners from budget (Australia) |
Main
| Hutton sought to spare Blair glaring headlines »
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Glen Owen, Education Correspondent
A TEAM of code breaking mathematicians is being assembled under a plan to create a latter day Bletchley Park, where scientists cracked the German Enigma codes in the Second World War. Thirty mathematicians will be based at a secret unit in Bristol, working on communications used by terrorists and criminals.
The centre, a joint initiative between Bristol University and the government listening station GCHQ, is offering premium salaries to attract the best minds. The successors to the Bletchley scientists, whose work under the mathematician Alan Turing gave birth to the computer, are being recruited through discreet advertisements in The Times Higher Education Supplement.
The centre will be headed by a pure mathematician on a salary of £75,000 a year — nearly twice the average professor’s wage. Promising students, who are likely to be the main target of the recruiters, can expect a “substantial premium” on the average £17,000 starting salary for post-doctoral research. Only British citizens can apply.
A university spokesman said that the project highlighted important areas of overlap between the intelligence community and academia, and represented a valuable financial boost for maths. GCHQ described it obliquely as “an exercise to get some bright minds together to do some mathematical research”.
May 14, 2004 at 07:48 PM in GCHQ | Permalink | TrackBack (68) | Top of page | Blog Home