Peter Hilton
| Peter Hilton | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | Peter John Hilton 7 April 1923 London, England, UK |
| Died | 6 November 2010 (aged 87) Binghamton, New York, U.S. |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Alma mater | The Queen's College, Oxford |
Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923 – 6 November 2010) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during the Second World War.
Hilton was born in London, the son of Elizabeth Amelia (Freedman) and Mortimer Jacob Hilton, and was educated at St Paul's School. He won a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford in 1940.
During the Second World War, as an undergraduate, Hilton was obliged to enroll in training with the Royal Artillery, and was scheduled for conscription in summer 1942. Instead, he was interviewed by a team touring universities looking for mathematicians with knowledge of German, and was offered a position in the Foreign Office without being told the nature of the work. The team was, in fact, recruiting on behalf of the Government Code and Cypher School. He accepted, and, aged 18, arrived at wartime codebreaking station Bletchley Park on 12 January 1942.
He was initially put to work on Naval Enigma in Hut 8. In late 1942, he transferred to work on German teleprinter ciphers. A special section known as the "Testery" had been formed in July 1942 to work on one such cipher, codenamed "Tunny", and Hilton was one of the early members of the group. His role was to devise ways to deal with changes in Tunny, and to liaise with another section working on Tunny, the "Newmanry", which complemented the hand-methods of the Testery with specialised codebreaking machinery. Occasionally the same message was sent repeated, a major security blunder which Bletchley park called a "depth." Hilton derived great satisfaction from being able to look at the encoded texts coming from two separate teleprinter messages, combine them and extract two messages in clear German. Hilton obtained his DPhil in 1949 from Oxford University under the supervision of John Henry Whitehead. His dissertation was titled, "Calculation of the Homotopy Groups of An2-polyhedra".
...
Wikipedia