W. T. Tutte | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC (tʌt; 14 May 1917 – 2 May 2002) was an English and Canadian 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. Kőnig's) toward its present extremely active state." Tutte was born in Newmarket in Suffolk. He was the younger son of William John Tutte (1873–1944), an estate gardener, and Annie (née Newell; 1881–1956), a housekeeper. Both parents worked at Fitzroy House stables where Tutte was born. The family spent some time in Buckinghamshire, County Durham and Yorkshire before returning to Newmarket, where Tutte attended Cheveley Church of England primary school in the nearby village of Cheveley. In 1927, when he was ten, Tutte won a scholarship to the Cambridge and County High School for Boys. He took up his place there in 1928.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (4)

Related concepts (17)

Related lectures (1)

Lorenz cipher

The Lorenz SZ40, SZ42a and SZ42b were German rotor stream cipher machines used by the German Army during World War II. They were developed by C. Lorenz AG in Berlin. The model name SZ was derived from Schlüssel-Zusatz, meaning cipher attachment. The instruments implemented a Vernam stream cipher. British cryptanalysts, who referred to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as Fish, dubbed the machine and its traffic Tunny (meaning tunafish) and deduced its logical structure three years before they saw such a machine.

Graph coloring

In graph theory, graph coloring is a special case of graph labeling; it is an assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph subject to certain constraints. In its simplest form, it is a way of coloring the vertices of a graph such that no two adjacent vertices are of the same color; this is called a vertex coloring. Similarly, an edge coloring assigns a color to each edge so that no two adjacent edges are of the same color, and a face coloring of a planar graph assigns a color to each face or region so that no two faces that share a boundary have the same color.

Hamiltonian path

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path (or traceable path) is a path in an undirected or directed graph that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian cycle (or Hamiltonian circuit) is a cycle that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian path that starts and ends at adjacent vertices can be completed by adding one more edge to form a Hamiltonian cycle, and removing any edge from a Hamiltonian cycle produces a Hamiltonian path.

Subdeterminant Maximization via Nonconvex Relaxations and Anti-Concentration

Nisheeth Vishnoi, Javad Ebrahimi Boroojeni, Damian Mateusz Straszak

Several fundamental problems that arise in optimization and computer science can be cast as follows: Given vectors v(1), ..., v(m) is an element of R-d and a constraint family B subset of 2([m]), find a set S. B that maximizes the squared volume of the sim ...

Ieee2017

X-Stream: Edge-centric Graph Processing using Streaming Partitions

Willy Zwaenepoel, Amitabha Roy, Ivo Mihailovic

X-Stream is a system for processing both in-memory and out-of-core graphs on a single shared-memory machine. While retaining the scatter-gather programming model with state stored in the vertices, X-Stream is novel in (i) using an edge-centric rather than ...

ACM2013

, ,

Dynamical networks with diffusive couplings are investigated from the point of view of synchronizability. Arbitrary connection graphs are admitted but the coupling is symmetric. Networks with equal interaction coefficients for all edges of the interaction ...

2007

Topology of Riemann Surfaces MATH-410: Riemann surfaces

Covers the topology of Riemann surfaces and the concept of triangulation using finitely many triangles.