John R. F. Jeffreys

A demonstration of Zygalski sheets, a tool for breaking the Enigma machine. This Polish invention was shared with the British in 1939, and the enormous task of manufacturing two complete sets of the sheets was supervised by Jeffreys. John Robert Fisher Jeffreys (25 January 1916 – 13 January 1944) was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.

Jeffreys was educated at Brentwood School, Essex, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he graduated as a Wrangler in Part II of the mathematics tripos in 1936. Appointed a research fellow at Downing, he joined the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park in September 1939 alongside fellow Cambridge mathematicians Gordon Welchman, with whom he had previously worked closely, and Alan Turing. These three, together with Peter Twinn and working under Dilly Knox, formed the research section working on the German Enigma machine, and were housed in "The Cottage" at Bletchley Park.

Jeffreys was put in charge of a small section manufacturing perforated sheets for use in the cryptanalysis of the Enigma, a task which took over three months, completed on 7 January 1940. One type were the Zygalski sheets, known as Netz at Bletchley Park, a technique revealed to the British by Polish cryptologists. Another type, named "Jeffreys sheets", were different, and were a "catalogue of the effect of any two Enigma rotors and the reflector".

In early 1940, a section called "Hut 6" — named after the building in which it was initially housed — was created to work on solving German Army and Air Force Enigma messages. Jeffreys was chosen to run the hut alongside Welchman. Jeffreys was in charge of "Sheet-Stacking and Machine Room activities", while Welchman handled "Registration, Intercept Control, Decoding, and relations with the intelligence people in Hut 3".

In May 1940, Jeffreys took a vacation, but became ill and was diagnosed with tuberculosis and diabetes. He died in January 1944.

Gordon Welchman later recalled: