William Tutte, the humble math professor who cracked top Nazi code(uwaterloo.ca)
uwaterloo.ca
William Tutte, the humble math professor who cracked top Nazi code
https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/spring-2015/features/keeping-secrets
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"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."
"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."
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
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
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?
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?
Prof Graham Farr of Monash University told Tutte's personal story at my show once. http://thelaborastory.com/stories/william-thomas-tutte/
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.
[1] http://contrastrebellion.com/