William Thomas Tutte

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William Thomas "Bill" Tutte (born May 14, 1917 in Newmarket , † May 2, 2002 in Kitchener-Waterloo ) was a British-Canadian cryptologist and mathematician . During the Second World War he helped decisively in deciphering the encrypted communication of the Wehrmacht . His work had a major impact on the liberation of Europe by the Allies . Further achievements are his fundamental results in the field of combinatorics and especially theGraph theory .

Life

William Tutte came from a humble background: his father, William John Tutte, was a gardener , his mother Annie Newell, cook and homemaker . In childhood, the family often moved depending on where the father found work. The first scholarship was awarded to Bill - as he was called by friends and relatives - at the age of 11 at Cambridge and County Day School. At 18, Tutte studied chemistry at Trinity College (Cambridge) . As a student he dealt with the problem of squaring the square (see below). After he had obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry in 1938 , he first began a master's degree in physical chemistry, but switched to mathematics in 1940.

Lorenz SZ42

After the outbreak of World War II, his then tutor recommended that he attend the Government Code and Cipher School ( GC&CS ), which he did in May 1941. Tutte worked at Bletchley Park as a cryptanalyst and succeeded in 1942 - this was later considered one of the greatest intellectual achievements during the Second World War called - by editing a few of intercepted German communications, the entire structure of the Lorenz SZ 40/42 - encryption engine derive (see also: cryptanalysis of the Lorenz machine ). This encryption ( code name : Tunny , German: "Tunfisch") was used for orders from high-ranking command posts and was therefore essential for the course of the war. Based on Tutte's breakthrough, the British built a number of computers (among others the Colossus ), be able to read the messages of the Wehrmacht.

In 1948 Tutte received his doctorate in mathematics from Cambridge University . From 1948 to 1962 he taught mathematics at the University of Toronto , Canada. Tutte did much of his later work at the University of Waterloo , Canada, where he taught from 1962 to 1985.

During his later career, Tutte concentrated on combinatorics and graph theory, areas of mathematics that were heavily influenced by him; For a long time he was considered one of the best in his field.

Paul Seymour of Princeton University writes:

“Professor Tutte was the leading figure in graph theory for many years, and his achievements in this field are unmatched by any other (in every sense, except perhaps quantity). There are many occasions when Tutte found beautiful results in a hitherto unexplored part of graph theory, and in some cases it was a 'breakthrough' that led to the development of an important new branch. "

When The Journal of Combinatorial Theory was founded, Tutte was editor-in-chief - at the same time he also worked for other magazines.

His work includes the (negatively) solved conjecture of Tait (1886) that every polyhedron has a Hamilton path (a path through the vertices of a graph that passes through each vertex exactly once) through all vertices. His work also contributed to advances in the area of ​​the four-color problem . His well-known results in the field of graph theory also include the so-called factor theorems by Tutte and theorems on group-valued circulations, a generalization of flows on networks .

As a student he published in 1940 with R. Leonard Brooks, Cedric Smith and Arthur Stone a graph-theoretical solution to the problem of squaring the rectangle, i.e. the division of a rectangle into non-overlapping squares, a problem that Max Dehn 1903 (Mathematische Annalen Vol. 57 ) had examined. Tutte and colleagues assigned a Smith graph to the divided rectangle and looked at electrical flows in this graph. With their method they gave a new proof of Max Dehn's theorems. With Brooks, Smith and Stone he was a member of the mathematicians group Blanche Descartes . They also gave (independently of Roland Sprague ) an example of the squaring of the square (with 69 squares).

In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Enumeration of planar maps ). Tutte was awarded the Henry Marshall Tory Medal in 1975 . In 1982 he won the Killam Prize and in 2001 the CRM Fields PIMS Prize . In October 2001, Tutte was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Canada . The ceremony took place at Rideau Hall in Ottawa .

See also

Fonts

  • Connectivity in graphs . 1966
  • Introduction to the theory of matroids . Elsevier, 1971
  • Graph theory . Addison-Wesley, 1984
  • Graph Theory as I Have Known It . 1998
  • Fish and I . (PDF; 62 kB) 1998; accessed on December 30, 2016.

documentation

  • Julian Carey: Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes (one-hour BBC documentary, 2011)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brooks, Smith, Stone, Tutte: The Dissection of Rectangles into Squares . In: Duke Math. Journal , Volume 7, 1940, pp. 312-340. The story is presented by Tutte in Gardner: More mathematical puzzles and diversions . Ross Honsberger also answered the problem .
  2. ↑ Dehn proved that a rectangle can be squared if and only if the sides are in a rational relationship (commensurable) and that there are then infinitely many perfect squares (with squares that all have different side lengths).
personal data
SURNAME Tutte, William Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tutte, Bill
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British cryptologist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Newmarket (Suffolk) , England
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 2002
Place of death Kitchener-Waterloo , Canada