Bill Tutte - Another Mathematician that helped with WW2

[psyang]

I got my Waterloo Alumni magazine recently, and there was an incredible article on one of the former profs there, Bill Tutte. In my first year there, I remember my algebra prof talking about Prof. Tutte in almost hushed whispers. He was a world expert in cryptology and graph theory and a brilliant mind, but I never knew much more than that.

About the time I was finishing my undergrad there, the stories about Alan Turing and the Enigma machine were coming out, which caused a little stir on campus – how math helped win World War 2.

Now with this article, I just learned that Bill Tutte may have had a bigger impact on the war’s outcome than Alan Turing. The news is already several years old, but it was new to me.

https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/spring...eeping-secrets

There, Tutte’s extraordinary achievement — breaking the complex German Lorenz code without ever seeing the machine that generated it — is said to have hastened the end of the war by about two years and saved millions of lives.

According to Bletchley Park historians, General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself described Tutte’s work as one of the greatest intellectual feats of the Second World War.

The Lorenz code machine — used by Adolf Hitler and senior members of the German High Command to communicate high-level strategy — was believed to be unbreakable, and trusted with the most sensitive, highly strategic information. Alan Turing’s Enigma, on the other hand, was used to send tactical messages between individual formations and units, notably ships and submarines.

“Bill Tutte cracked the German Lorenz code, which was vastly more complex than Enigma and strategically much more important. However, for continuing Cold War security reasons his achievement was not publicly acknowledged, while Turing went on to dominate the history of Bletchley Park, largely as a result of the tragic circumstances of his death.”

Looks like there was also a documentary made about him: