William Tutte, the humble math professor who cracked top Nazi code

https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/spring-2015/features/keeping-secrets

by jdnier • 11 years ago

34 7 11 years ago

jdnier• 11 years ago

"Tutte’s extraordinary achievement — breaking the complex German Lorenz code without ever seeing the machine that generated it — is said to have hastened the end of the war by about two years and saved millions of lives."

"The Lorenz code machine — used by Adolf Hitler and senior members of the German High Command to communicate high-level strategy — was believed to be unbreakable, and trusted with the most sensitive, highly strategic information. Alan Turing’s Enigma, on the other hand, was used to send tactical messages between individual formations and units, notably ships and submarines."

lotharbot• 11 years ago

jboggan• 11 years ago

Amazing. I always knew him as the discoverer of the Tutte Graph, which was the first known counterexample to what at the time was the most promising route to proving the Four Color Theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutte_graph

Later I learned about the Tutte polynomial of a graph, which I believe ranks up there as one of the deepest and most unexpected relations in mathematics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutte_polynomial

Tycho• 11 years ago

Article doesn't seem to ask/answer any of the obvious questions such as

a) were Enigma and Lorenz related? Did the work to crack one help crack the other?

b) wasn't the development of computers the main breakthrough at Bletchley? whose work was the biggest contributor there?

andreabedini• 11 years ago

Prof Graham Farr of Monash University told Tutte's personal story at my show once. http://thelaborastory.com/stories/william-thomas-tutte/

J_Darnley• 11 years ago

What a wonderful blank white page. It really tells the story of secret code breaking. It is still so secret that nobody can know anything about it.

kristianp• 11 years ago

This page is really hard to read, the text is too light and too thin. See [1]. Not to mention the header is too big.

[1] http://contrastrebellion.com/

William Tutte, the humble math professor who cracked top Nazi code

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