Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution
A team of codebreakers discovered – and then cracked – more than 50 secret letters written by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
The three codebreakers – George Lasry, a computer scientist and cryptographer; Norbert Biermann, a pianist and music professor; and Satoshi Tomokiyo, a physicist and patents expert – essentially stumbled upon the letters while combing the Bibliothèque nationale de France's online archives for enciphered letters.
In order to crack the code, the trio used a combination of computerized and manual codebreaking along with linguistic and contextual analysis. Assuming the language was French, however, did result in partial decryption – allowing the team to recover bits of plain text. The trio then recovered homophones used to represent single letters of the alphabet, as well as special symbols identifying people and places.
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