George Lasry
The algorithmist who keeps solving what everyone else gave up on.
Cryptanalysis researcher.
George Lasry
George Lasry is a software engineer turned computational cryptanalyst who has spent the past fifteen years developing and applying advanced algorithmic methods to historically unsolved cipher manuscripts. Working largely independently or in small collaborations, he has produced an extraordinary string of solutions to ciphers that had defeated historians, linguists, and amateur cryptanalysts for decades. His methods center on combining statistical language models with metaheuristic optimization algorithms — particularly simulated annealing and hill climbing — implemented in custom software applied to historical manuscripts.
Why This Person Matters
Lasry’s work illustrates how computer search, language statistics and historical interpretation can complement one another. A documented example is the recovery of Mary Stuart’s letters with Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo, published in 2023. This work should not be confused with the separate teams that solved Copiale in 2011 and Z340 in 2020.
The 2011 Copiale decipherment was the work of Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer, not Lasry. Their analysis found German plaintext: many ordinary Roman letters acted as nulls or separators, while the distinctive symbols carried the encrypted text. See their original paper.
David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke solved Z340 in 2020. That result is not attributed to Lasry here. His documented contributions to historical cryptanalysis include published work on classical cipher search and archival decipherment; see the Mary Stuart case below.
In 2023 Lasry, Biermann and Tomokiyo published their decipherment of Mary Stuart’s lost letters from 1578–1584. The recovered correspondence demonstrates how identifying an archive’s unknown writer can be part of the cryptanalytic result.
| Background | Computer scientist; software engineer in telecommunications |
| Affiliation | Contributor, Cryptologia; DECRYPT project collaborator |
| Mary Stuart letters | Co-solved 2023 with Biermann and Tomokiyo |
| Zodiac ciphers | Published analyses; Z-340 solved 2020 by others, Z-13 unsolved |
| Other solves | Multiple 16th–19th century diplomatic cipher manuscripts |
| Approach | Hill climbing, simulated annealing, and MCMC applied to historical ciphers |
| Degree | PhD in computational cryptanalysis (while in middle age) |