Mateureka, the Mateureka, Museum of Mathematics and Calculation of Pennabilli (Rimini), from July 7 to August 26, 2012, hosts the international exhibition “Enigma. Decipher a victory. Poles serving Europe.”
The exhibition covers cryptography and, in particular, thanks to the collaboration of the General Consulate of the Republic of Poland in Milan and the Wielkopolska Region, presents the contribution of Polish mathematicians to the decoding of the German cryptographic machine "Enigma", which has determined the victory of allies on Nazism.

For thousands of years the history of man has been crossed by the struggle between those who invent more and more sophisticated methods to transmit secret messages and those who do everything to decrypt the codes, that is to discover its hidden meaning. In this confrontation are involved in mathematics, linguistics, enigmistics, statistics, electronics, computer science, quantum physics...

Until recently cryptography, also thanks to the cold war, was seen as a weapon at the service of the military and national security of the main powers. But this vision is now obsolete. Today a huge number of messages travel on all sorts of channels, from traditional mail to Telephone, radio, telefax, internet and high-speed data transmission lines; often they are valuable and confidential information, to be protected from ears and eyes indiscreet. Privacy protection has become vital for all of us and only cryptography can ensure it effectively. The integrity and confidentiality of communications depend on complex codes made thanks to the calculation.

In the exhibition there are also numerous interactive exhibits and reconstructions (from the Spanish scitale to the code of Giulio Cesare, from the disc of L.B.Alberti to the ciphers of Vigenère and Jefferson), up to the current programs of protection for the internet and for the devices e.mobile. On multimedia stations it is possible to experiment, among other things, the operation of Enigma and the Turing machine, recalling the 100 years from birth, and viewing historical footage on the origin of the computer because one of the most important technological relapses of the struggle between inventors and code solvers, between cryptography and cryptanalysis, was precisely the computer. A conference on quantum cryptography will conclude the exhibition, taking a look at the future of this millenary competition.