Editing William F. Friedman (section)

== Early life ==
Friedman was born '''Wolf Friedman''' ({{langx|yi|װאָלף פֿרידמאַן}}, {{langx|ru|Вольф Ф. Фридман}}), in [[Kishinev]], [[Bessarabia Governorate|Bessarabia]], the son of Frederick Friedman, a Jew from [[Bucharest]] who worked as a [[translator]] and [[linguist]] for the Russian Postal Service, and the daughter of a well-to-do wine merchant. Friedman's family left Kishinev in 1892 on account of anti-Semitic persecution, ending up in [[Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]].<ref>[http://www.huachuca.army.mil/sites/History/PDFS/MFRIED.PDF "William W. Friedman: Principal Cryptologist"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110717134140/http://www.huachuca.army.mil/sites/History/PDFS/MFRIED.PDF |date=2011-07-17 }}</ref>  Three years later, his first name was changed to William.

As a child, Friedman was introduced to cryptography in the short story "[[The Gold-Bug]]" by [[Edgar Allan Poe]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Rosenheim |first=Shawn James |title=The Cryptographic Imagination |publisher=[[Johns Hopkins University Press]] |year=1997 |page=11 |isbn=0-8018-5331-1 }}</ref> He studied at the Michigan Agricultural College (known today as [[Michigan State University]]) in [[East Lansing, Michigan|East Lansing]] and received a scholarship to work on [[genetics]] at [[Cornell University]]. Meanwhile, [[George Fabyan]], who ran a private research laboratory to study any personally interesting project, decided to set up his own genetics project and was referred to Friedman. Friedman joined Fabyan's [[Riverbank Laboratories]] outside [[Chicago, Illinois|Chicago]] in September 1915. As head of the Department of Genetics, one of the projects he ran studied the effects of moonlight on crop growth, and so he experimented with the planting of [[wheat]] during various phases of the [[moon]].