William Thomas Tutte (May 14, 1917 - May 2, 2002) was a British codebreaker and mathematician. During World War II, Tutte worked at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker, and was able to deduce the structure of the German Lorenz SZ 40/42 encryption machine, used for high-level communications.

Tutte was born in Newmarket in Suffolk, the son of a gardener. At age 18 he studied chemistry at Cambridge University. As a student he worked on the problem of squaring the square. His tutor suggested he join the Government Code and Cipher School, which he did in 1941.

His later career concentrated on graph theory. Among other achievements, he disproved Tait's conjecture using the construction known as Tutte's fragment . A majority of his later work was done at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada.

References

• Brooks, R. L.; Smith, C. A. B.; Stone, A. H.; and Tutte, W. T. "The Dissection of Rectangles into Squares." Duke Math. J. 7, 312-340, 1940

External links

• Tutte's paper on one of the Fish ciphers http://frode.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/tutte.html
• Obituary http://www.cms.math.ca/bulletins/obit.html
• Guardian newspaper obituary of W. T. Tutte http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,712971,00.html
• http://www.crm.umontreal.ca/prix/prix_CRM_Fields_an.html#2001
• Tutte's disproof of Tait's conjecture http://www.math.niu.edu/%7Erusin/known-math/97/tutte