W. T. Tutte

W. T. Tutte
Born
William Thomas Tutte

(1917-05-14)14 May 1917
Died2 May 2002(2002-05-02) (aged 84)
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
Alma materTrinity College, Cambridge (PhD)
Known for
Spouse
Dorothea Mitchell
(m. 1949; died 1994)
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
University of Waterloo
Thesis An Algebraic Theory of Graphs[1]  (1948)
Doctoral advisorShaun Wylie[1]
Doctoral students

William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC (/tʌt/; 14 May 1917 – 2 May 2002) was an English and Canadian code breaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany.[2][3] He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.[4][5]

Tutte's research in the field of graph theory proved to be of remarkable importance. At a time when graph theory was still a primitive subject, Tutte commenced the study of matroids and developed them into a theory by expanding from the work that Hassler Whitney had first developed around the mid-1930s.[6] Even though Tutte's contributions to graph theory have been influential to modern graph theory and many of his theorems have been used to keep making advances in the field, most of his terminology was not in agreement with their conventional usage and thus his terminology is not used by graph theorists today.[7] "Tutte advanced graph theory from a subject with one text (D. Kőnig's) toward its present extremely active state."[7]

  1. ^ a b c W. T. Tutte at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Hinsley & Stripp 1993, p. 8
  3. ^ Brzezinski 2005, p. 18
  4. ^ Younger 2012
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference MacTutorBiog was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Johnson, Will. "Matroids" (PDF). Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  7. ^ a b Hobbs, Arthur M.; James G. Oxley (March 2004). "William T. Tutte (1917–2002)" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 51 (3): 322.