Lester Saunders Hill (1890-1961) is famous for having discovered the Hill cryptosystem (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_cipher). It was recently discovered that Hill wrote an unpublished paper (undated but probably written in the 1920s) in which he discovered a class of error-correcting codes not found by others until decades later. This screencast is a non-technical exposition into the history of this side of Hill’s work.

Thanks to Chris Christensen, David Kahn, and Rene Stein (librarian for NSA Cryptologic Museum) for material on which this presentation is based. For more on the “message protector”, see http://www.nku.edu/~christensen/Cryptological%20History%20Symposium.pdf.