Mathematician and Code-breaker Dies

[Dave Monroe]

>From Wolfgang Saxon [!], "William Tutte, 84,
Mathematician and Code-breaker, Dies," NY Times, May
10th, 2002 ...

William Tutte, a theoretical mathematician who
contributed substantially to breaking codes in World
War II, died on May 2 in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.
He was 84.

The cause was congestive heart failure complicated by
cancer of the spleen, the University of Waterloo
announced. He was distinguished professor emeritus of
combinatorics and optimization and honorary director
of the university's Center for Cryptographic Research.

A chemistry graduate student at Cambridge in 1941,
young Mr. Tutte was sent to the now-fabled Bletchley
Park, where a secret code-breaking operation had been
set up. There, applying solely his mind and logic, he
deciphered a key part of the German military code that
others, equipped with a model of the German Enigma
encrypting machine, had failed to break.

After settling in Canada, he went to the fledgling
University of Waterloo in 1962 and helped build its
faculty of mathematics into a magnet for theoreticians
and students alike. He became a leader in the
evolution of combinatorics, the science of counting
separate objects, which he first broached in his
doctoral thesis more than 50 years ago.

William Tutte (pronounced tut) was born in Newmarket,
Suffolk, near Cambridge. At Cambridge, he and several
friends tackled a seemingly straightforward geometry
problem: dividing a square into smaller squares. It is
trivial to cut a square into four smaller, identical
squares. But mathematicians had not figured out
whether it was possible to cut a square into smaller
squares where no two were the same size.

The Cambridge students not only showed that it is
possible, but they also came up with an ingenious
solution: they showed that the problem was equivalent
to calculating the electrical resistance in a network
of circuits. Throughout his career, he was able to
perceive subtle connections that others might not even
have thought to look for....

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/10/obituaries/10TUTT.html


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