William Thomas Tutte

W. T. Tutte
Born	(1917-05-14)May 14, 1917 Newmarket, Suffolk, England
Died	May 2, 2002(2002-05-02) (aged 84) Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Toronto University of Waterloo
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge (Ph.D.)
Thesis	An Algebraic Theory of Graphs (1948)
Doctoral advisor	Shaun Wylie
Doctoral students	Neil Robertson
Known for	BEST theorem Hanani–Tutte theorem Peripheral cycle Tutte 12-cage Tutte embedding Tutte graph Tutte homotopy theorem Tutte matrix Tutte polynomial Tutte theorem Tutte–Berge formula Tutte–Coxeter graph Tutte–Grothendieck invariant Tutte's "1+2 break in" Tutte's 1-factor theorem Tutte's fragment Tutte's linking theorem Tutte's planarity criterion Tutte's statistical method Tutte's triangle lemma Tutte's unimodular representation theorem Tutte's wheel theorem
Notable awards	Jeffery-Williams Prize (1971) Henry Marshall Tory Medal (1975) Isaak-Walton-Killam Award (1982) CRM-Fields-PIMS prize (2001)
Spouse	Dorothea Mitchell (m. 1949–1994, her death)

William Thomas "Bill" Tutte OC FRS FRSC (/tʌt/; May 14, 1917 – May 2, 2002) was a British codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. 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 (D. König’s) toward its present extremely active state."

Tutte was born in Newmarket in Suffolk, the son of a gardener. He completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Trinity College, Cambridge with first class honours in 1938. He continued with physical chemistry as a graduate student, gaining an MSc in 1941, but transferred to mathematics at the end of 1940. As a student, he (along with three of his friends) became one of the first to solve the problem of squaring the square, and the first to solve the problem without a squared subrectangle. Together the four created the pseudonym Blanche Descartes, under which Tutte published occasionally for years.

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