William T. Tutte

William T. Tutte, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo was internationally renowned for his work in the area of graph theory.

=Early Life= Tutte was born in Newmarket, England in 1917. He was the son of a gardener and a caretaker. He moved a great deal in his youth eventually ending up in the village of Cheveley. He went to the village school there between the ages of 6 and 11. Eventually he took the scholarship examinations for secondary school and attended Cambridge and County High School for Boys.

He attended Trinity College, Cambridge on numerous scholarships. He majored in Chemistry and went on to do graduate studies in that field. He participated regularly in meetings of the Trinity Mathematical Society. He, and some other undergraduates studied a number of problems, but the one most remembered is whether a square can be partitioned into smaller squares, all unequal in size. This is known as squaring the square and is the cause of the C&O department's logo.

=World War II= In January 1941, Tutte went to Bletchley Park. In October, Tutte encountered TUNNY, the first of a set of machine ciphers named Fish. This code was used for high level communications between Berlin and the field commanders.

In August 1941, a German operator sent a Fish-enciphered teleprinter message of some 4000 letters from Athens to Berlin. These messages were not received properly and so were resent. It was sent a second time with the same setting. This was used to decipher this particular message. In October it was presented to Tutte who uncovered, from samples of the messages alone, the structure of the machines which generated these codes.

Tutte began by observing the machine generated obscuring string carefully. He noticed signs of periodicity in strings of various lengths and determined that for the first of the five teleprinter tape positions, the regularity he supposed arose from a wheel of 41 sprockets. And then at the last position, one of 23 sprockets. Over the next months, Tutte and colleagues worked out the complete internal structure, that it had twelve wheels, two for each of the five teleprinter positions, and two with an executive function. They determined the number of sprockets on each wheel, and how the advancement of the wheels was interrelated. They had completely recreated the machine without ever having seen one.

Knowing how an enciphering machine is built is necessary to break the code, however one needs to determine the initial settings. Tutee created an algorithm, the "Statistical Method", which looked for certain types of resonances. There were too many possibilities for this to be carried out by hand and so in 1943 the electronic computer COLOSSUS was designed and built by the British Post Office to run the algorithms that Tutte; and his collaborators Max Newman and Ralph Tester; developed.This man-machine combination was used to break Fish codes on a regular basis throughout the remainder of the War.

=Post-War Academic Life= In late 1945, Tutte resumed his studies at Cambridge as a graduate student in mathematics.

Once his degree was completed he came to Canada and joined the Faculty of the University of Toronto. He stayed there for 14 years from 1948- 1962. During this time he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

In 1962, Tutte joined the University of Waterloo. Tutte was an important ingredient in the recipe that produced the Faculty of Mathematics in 1967, becoming one of the first members of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization. He retired in 1985, but continued to be a significant member of the Faculty as Professor Emeritus. Until his retirement, he was Editor in Chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory.