publicly that such coded messages could not be found in any other work than the Bible, and, in an interview with Newsweek, he challenged: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." Using the Bible decryption method espoused by the group led by Eliyahu Rips, McKay quickly found some nine references to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in Herman Melville's masterpiece. He also showed that the same technique allowed him to find ostensible mentions of Diana, Princess of Wales, her lover Dodi Fayed, and their chauffeur Henri Paul in the same novel. This debunking disproof of a theory that the bible encrypts secret messages containing future world history achieved international fame for McKay outside of his specific field of combinatorics. Azzam Pasha quotation McKay was involved in the uncovering of the original source of the Azzam Pasha quotation. The original source, an 11 October 1947 article in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom, was first referenced in an article by David Barnett and Efraim Karsh in the Fall 2011 issue of Middle East Quarterly without reference to McKay. Tom Segev responded in an op-ed in Haaretz that McKay had in fact been the original source of the material and had uploaded it to Wikipedia. McKay had notified the Wikipedia talk page of having found the original interview from which the quote was taken and later provided it to Barnett. According to Karsh, McKay was offered a co-author credit in the Middle East Quarterly article but he declined on the grounds of having a low opinion of the publication. Further He gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Combinatorics". References External links Plantri and Fullgen, programs for generation of certain types of planar graphs, developed by Brinkmann and McKay Excerpt from a transcript of the debate between Drosnin and McKay, in October 1997 20th-century Australian mathematicians 21st-century Australian mathematicians Australian computer scientists Australian National University faculty Combinatorialists University of Melbourne alumni Mathematicians from Melbourne 1951 births Living people Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science