In Popular Culture
- Commander Schoen, a character appearing in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, is to a large extent inspired by Friedman. Schoen shares a significant background and personality traits with Friedman, including being one of the top cryptanalysts of the U.S. Army, breaking Japanese codes prior to Japan's involvement in World War II, and the psychological problems that he suffered from as a result.
Read more about this topic: William F. Friedman
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)