Professor William Thomas Tutte

1917 - 2002  (84 years)

• Name	William Thomas Tutte
  Prefix	Professor
  Born	14 May 1917	Newmarket, Suffolk, England   [1]
  Gender	Male
  Died	2 May 2002	Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada   [1]
  	Cause: congestive heart failure
  Honoured	2009  [1]
  	Officer of the Order of Canada
  Honoured	2017	William Tutte Way, Waterloo City, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada
  	William Tutte Way named in his honour
  Interesting	military, honoured, life story
  Interesting	military, story, honoured
  Military	WW2 - Code breaker
  Name	Bill Tutte
  Eby ID Number	Waterloo-261781
  Buried	West Montrose United Cemetery, West Montrose, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada   [1]
  Person ID	I261781	Generations
  Last Modified	9 Jun 2025

  
  

  Family	Dorothea G.,   b. 1917,   d. 1994  (Age 77 years)
  Last Modified	10 Jun 2025
  Family ID	F233115	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Photos

  Wiliam T. Tutte image from www.AlanTuring.net

  
  

• Notes

  William Tutte, 84, Mathematician and Code-breaker, Dies By WOLFGANG SAXON Published: May 10, 2002 New York Times 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. "He looks at it in a way which is totally more fundamental than you can imagine," said Dr. Daniel Younger, a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo. His problem-solving ability was key to his code-breaking success. When he joined the Enigma code-breakers, they had succeeded in reading the communications of the German Navy and Air Force. But the army version proved more elusive, particularly the machine-cipher FISH, used only by the army high command. The code-breakers had one crucial piece of data. A German radio operator had sent the same message of about 4,000 letters twice, with only a few changes. That produces two long strands of gibberish, but gibberish that looked tantalizingly similar. Examining them for four months, Mr. Tutte saw patterns in the seemingly random string of characters. One of the components of the message encoder, he deduced, was a wheel with exactly 41 sprockets. He also deduced that the first wheel was connected to a second wheel of 31 sprockets. Together with other code-breakers, he figured out the structure of all 12 wheels of the encoding machine, without ever seeing the original German device. Last October, when he was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada in Ottawa, the citation hailed that as "one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II." He returned to Cambridge and, switching to mathematics, received his doctorate in 1948. His thesis mixed combinatorics with the more abstract field of algebra and spun them into a new field of study called matroid theory. Immediately after graduation, he began teaching at the University of Toronto, then moved to Waterloo, about 60 miles from Toronto. One practical reason for the interest in combinatorics was the graph theory, in which graphs can serve as abstract models for many different kinds of relations among sets of varying objects. A simple example of graph theory is the four-color map problem, or determining how many colors are needed to color in the countries on a map so that no two countries of the same color touch. With the development of computer technology, graph theory has found uses in chemistry, physics, demographics, economics and other fields. When mathematicians finally definitively proved in the 1970's that four colors are enough for any map to avoid two touching colors, they used methods pioneered by Dr. Tutte and another mathematician, Hassler Whitney. "He was the leading mathematician in combinatorics for three decades," Dr. Younger said. Dr. Tutte was editor in chief of The Journal of Combinatorial Theory in its early years and was on the editorial boards of several other research journals. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society of London. He left no immediate survivors. His wife, Dorothea, died in 1994. __________________________ UW names street after Bletchley Park code-breaker Waterloo Region Record By Catherine Thompson WATERLOO The University of Waterloo is honouring a pre-eminent mathematician and wartime code-breaker, naming the street that runs between its math buildings after William Tutte. The British-born Tutte's work at Bletchley Park, Britain's top-secret code-breaking organization, helped changed the course of the Second World War and has been called "the greatest intellectual feat" of the war. But Tutte, a brilliant mathematician who helped establish the reputation of the university's mathematics faculty, was sworn to secrecy about his wartime work, which only came to light in the late 1990s, when he was 80. After the war, Tutte became a professor at the University of Toronto, then moved to the fledgling University of Waterloo in 1962. As a star in his field, he was able to attract some of the brightest minds to Waterloo and its faculty of mathematics, where he was a professor in the Combinatorics and Optimization Department for more than 30 years. He was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2001. "It's only being recognized now that his contributions were probably greater than any other code breaker" at Bletchley Park, said Daniel Younger, a professor emeritus in the university's math department who was Tutte's longtime friend. Tutte came to Bletchley Park in 1941. Unlike the better-known decoders of the famous Enigma machine, Tutte did not have a machine to work with. Instead, using only samples of coded messages, he managed to deduce the machine that could produce such messages, how such a machine would work and what it would look like. He then went on to describe how to crack the codes the machine produced, developing algorithms so complex that Bletchley engineers built Colossus, widely considered to be the first electronic computer, to execute Tutte's algorithms. Cracking the Lorenz code helped changed the course of the war because the Lorenz machine was the one Hitler used to send messages to his top generals in the field. Tutte's work helped turn the Battle of Kursk, powered the D-Day landings and likely shortened the Second World War. The naming ceremony takes place Friday as part of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Faculty of Mathematics, and coincides with what would have been Tutte's 100th birthday this Sunday. The ceremony begins at 11 a.m. at the David Centre with a talk by Younger about Tutte's many achievements and his contributions to mathematics, followed by the sign ceremony at noon and a screening at 1 p.m. of the 2011 BBC documentary, "Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes" about Tutte and his Bletchley colleague Tommy Flowers, who developed the Colossus computer. For more information on Tutte and his work, go to uwaterloo.ca/combinatorics-and-optimization/about/professor-william-t-tutte UW names street after Bletchley Park code-breaker. (2017). Therecord.com. Retrieved 11 May 2017, from https://www.therecord.com/news-story/7308387-uw-names-street-after-bletchley-park-code-breaker/

  
  

• Sources

  [S2021] News - New York, New York - New York Times, William Tutte, 84, Mathematician and Code-breaker, Dies 10 May 2002.

  
  

• Event Map

  Born - 14 May 1917 - Newmarket, Suffolk, England Died - Cause: congestive heart failure - 2 May 2002 - Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada Honoured - William Tutte Way named in his honour - 2017 - William Tutte Way, Waterloo City, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada Buried - - West Montrose United Cemetery, West Montrose, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada  = Link to Google Earth