Shaun Wylie

Shaun Wylie (born January 17, 1913 in Oxford , † October 2, 2009 in Cambridge ) was a British mathematician ( topology ) and cryptologist .

Live and act

Wylie attended Winchester College and then studied mathematics and classical languages ​​at Oxford University (New College) on a scholarship . In 1937 he received his doctorate with a thesis on topology at Princeton University under Solomon Lefschetz (Duality and intersection in general complexes). 1938/1939 he was a Fellow of Trinity Hall of Cambridge University , where he also after the Second World War , which he described as Enigma - cryptanalyst in Bletchley Park , returning spent. In 1958 he became chief mathematician at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the British cryptography authority. He retired in 1973 and then taught math and Greek at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (now Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge) for seven years. He was also involved in the founding of the British Social Democratic Party and was active in a university for pensioners in Cambridge (University of the Third Age), where shortly before his death he and partners recited Greek tragedies in the original language.

He came to work at Bletchley Park during World War II at the invitation of Alan Turing in 1940 when he was a tutor at Wellington College. He was assigned to Turing's Hut 8 , where he headed the crib department, which looked for suspected plaintext words (cribs) in the Enigma ciphertexts . According to Turing's successor in the management of Hut 8, Hugh Alexander , Wylie was the most important employee in the department after Turing, astonishingly fast and the most versatile ( best all-rounder ). He was commonly called Doc Wiley there. In the fall of 1943 he moved to the department that finally cracked the German Lorenz key machine ( called Tunny by the British ) , which was used for top-level secret communications.

In 1980 he became an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall. He was an accomplished chess and bridge player and early active hockey player who represented Scotland internationally in 1938. For The Listener he composed crossword puzzles under the pseudonym wyliecoat .

His students include Erik Christopher Zeeman , William Tutte and John Frank Adams .

He was married (he met his wife Odette Murray in Bletchley Park) and had three sons and a daughter.

Fonts

• with Peter Hilton : Homology theory - an introduction to algebraic topology. Cambridge University Press 1960, 1967.

Web links

• Photo taken around WWII.
• Photo from a later time.
• Shaun Wylie in the honor roll (Roll of Honor) of Bletchley Park
• Obituary in the Daily Telegraph 2009

Remarks

1. ↑ Shaun Wylie Biography (English). Retrieved February 3, 2017.
2. ↑ Doctorates were not awarded in England at the time
3. ↑ Public-key cryptography was invented there in the 1960s , but kept secret. Wylie wrote in a 1969 commentary on the work that unfortunately he could not find any errors in it