Bletchley Park codebreaker Jack Good, 1916-2009

Jack Good, who has died aged 92, was a member of the brilliant code-breaking team at Bletchley Park that contributed to the Allied victory in WWII, said the Guardian. A "mathematical genius", he later helped build one of the first computers, and made important advances in probability theory. And he also made his mark on the world of cinema: it was Good who advised Stanley Kubrick on the scientific content of his classic movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Isidore Jacob Gudak was born in London in 1916, the son of a Polish watchmaker. Having excelled at school, he went to Cambridge, where he won the Smith's Prize for mathematics. The young prodigy - who by then had anglicised his name to Jack Good - also won the county chess title.

It was this feat that led to an interview in 1941 with Hugh Alexander, the reigning British chess champion, who assigned him to the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS, known to its staff as the Golf Club and Chess Society) at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.

Good found himself working under the outstanding mathematician Alan Turing, Bletchley's presiding genius, with whom, initially, he did not get on. Turing was appalled to find the new boy taking a nap on his first night-shift, and only spoke to him again after he had made breakthroughs in deciphering German naval codes.

Good discovered, for instance, that especially sensitive messages were enciphered first with a normal code, then with a special code, instead of the other way round, as Turing and others had suspected.

The two men ended the War firm friends and worked together in Manchester on the first ever computer controlled by an internally stored programme, said the Times. Good's specialist area was probability, however.

In 1967 Good was appointed Professor of Statistics at Virginia Tech university

His work on the theories of the 18th century statistician Thomas Bayes played a leading role in the development of "Bayesian statistics" as a practical tool for assessing risk in fields such as medicine and defence.

Yet he still found time to study, and write about, artificial intelligence (which was what prompted Kubrick to get in touch). In 1967 Good was appointed Professor of Statistics at Virginia Tech, and he spent the rest of his life in the US.

Although for many years he was bound by the Official Secrets Act not to speak about his wartime employment, he made jocular reference to it in his choice of number-plate for his car: '007 IJG'. ·