W. T. Tutte

Who was W. T. Tutte?

William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC, known as Bill Tutte, was a British, later Canadian, codebreaker and mathematician. During World War II he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major German cipher system. The intelligence obtained from these decrypts had a significant impact on the Allied victory in Europe. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.

Tutte’s research in the field of graph theory proved to be of remarkable importance. At a time when graph theory was still a primitive subject, Tutte commenced the study of matroids and developed them into a theory by expanding from the work that Hassler Whitney had first developed around the mid 1930s. Even though Tutte’s contributions to graph theory have been influential to modern graph theory and many of his theorems have been used to keep making advances in the field, most of his terminology was not in agreement with their conventional usage and thus his terminology is not used by graph theorists today. "Tutte advanced graph theory from a subject with one text toward its present extremely active state"