Peter Hilton

Peter Hilton (1970)

Peter John Hilton (born April 7, 1923 in London , † November 6, 2010 in Binghamton (New York) ) was a British mathematician who mainly dealt with homotopy theory.

Youth and Time in Bletchley Park

Hilton attended the St.Paul's School in London and won a scholarship with which he 1940 the Queen's College of Oxford University visited. He taught himself the German language in autodidactic work.

During the Second World War he was used from 1941 because of his mathematical and linguistic knowledge on a secret project of the State Department, the Bletchley Park . First he worked in the Testery on the decryption of German codes. His colleagues there included Alan Turing , Hugh Alexander , Peter Benenson and Donald Michie .

First, Hilton worked with Turing on the encoding of the German sea fleet by the Enigma , in particular on officer messages. It was used in a team of about 30 mathematicians end of 1942, under the name "Testery" at the decoding of a code used since 1940 by the nickname Tunny (English tuna ) for messages between Adolf Hitler worked and German generals. After the war it turned out that it was a Lorenz SZ40 . Hilton rose there to head the Tunny project . The success of cryptanalysis led to the construction of an emulator called Heath Robinson and a successor model called Colossus . Ten Colossus devices were eventually used.

Hilton (2nd from left) with Eckmann, Serre, André Haefliger, Zurich 2007

From the 1980s onwards, Hilton lectured frequently around the world about his work at Bletchley Park.

After the Second World War

In 1949 he received his doctorate from JHC Whitehead in Oxford ( Calculation of the Homotopy Groups of -polyhedra ${\displaystyle A_{n}^{2}}$ ). He then went to the University of Cambridge and the University of Manchester . In 1958 he became a professor at the University of Birmingham and in 1962 at Cornell University , where he remained until 1971. He was then a professor at the University of Washington , at the Batelle Institute, at Case Western Reserve University (as Louis D. Beaumont Professor) and from 1982 at Binghamton University , where he retired in 1995. He taught in the spring semesters at the University of Central Florida .

Hilton made important contributions to algebraic topology and homological algebra and worked extensively on mathematics education. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Extensions of functors on groups and coefficients in a cohomology theory ).

From 1949 he was married to the actress Margaret Mostyn (then Margaret Hilton), with whom he had two sons.

Fonts

• An introduction to homotopy theory. Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, Vol. 43, Cambridge University Press, 1953, ISBN 0-521-05265-3 .
• with Shaun Wylie : Homology theory: An introduction to algebraic topology. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1960, 1967, ISBN 0-521-09422-4 .
• Homotopy theory and duality. Gordon and Breach, New York-London-Paris, 1965, ISBN 0-677-00295-5 .
• with Guido Mislin, Joe Roitberg: Localization of nilpotent groups and spaces. North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam-Oxford, 1975, ISBN 0-444-10776-2 .
• Nilpotent groups and nilpotent spaces. Springer-Verlag 1982 (lecture at the ETH Zurich).
• General cohomology and theory . ${\displaystyle K}$Cambridge University Press 1971 (lecture in São Paulo 1968).
• with Urs Stammbach : A course in homological algebra. 2nd Edition. Springer Verlag, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1997, ISBN 0-387-94823-6 .
• with Jean Pedersen, Derek Holton: Mathematical Reflections - in a room with many mirrors. Springer, 1998, ISBN 0-387-94770-1 .
• with Jean Pedersen, Derek Holton: Mathematical Vistas. Springer-Verlag 2002, ISBN 0-387-95064-8 .
• with Hubert Brian Griffiths: Classical mathematics in a contemporary presentation. 3 volumes, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1976–1978, (English: A Comprehensive Textbook of Classical Mathematics. Springer-Verlag 1970).
• with Yel-Chiang Wu: A course in modern algebra. Wiley Interscience 1974, 1989, ISBN 0-471-50405-X .
• Living with Fish: Breaking Tunny in the Newmanry and the Testery. In: Jack Copeland (Ed.): Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-19-284055-X , p. 183.
• Interview with Hilton in Cryptologia, Vol. 30, 2006, No. 3, p. 236 (conducted by David Kahn, David Joyner).

literature

• Jean Pedersen (Ed.): Peter Hilton: codebreaker and mathematician. In: Notices AMS. 58, no. 11, (2011), pp. 1538–1552. (on-line)
• Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson Mathematical People - Profiles and Interviews , Birkhäuser 1985

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Hilton Obituary. on: legacy.com (from: Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin. November 8, 2010)
2. ↑ Peter John Hilton. on: www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk
3. ^ Professor Peter Hilton. In: The Guardian . November 10, 2010, accessed November 12, 2010.

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Hilton in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage at Binghamton University
• The World Celebrates Professor's Birthday. (April 25, 2008 memento on the Internet Archive ) University of Central Florida
• Peter Hilton: Reminiscences of Bletchley Park 1942-1945. AMS History of Mathematics Vol. 1, online