

William Tutte, the humble math professor who cracked top Nazi code - jdnier
https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/spring-2015/features/keeping-secrets

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jboggan
Amazing. I always knew him as the discoverer of the Tutte Graph, which was the
first known counterexample to what at the time was the most promising route to
proving the Four Color Theorem:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutte_graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutte_graph)

Later I learned about the Tutte polynomial of a graph, which I believe ranks
up there as one of the deepest and most unexpected relations in mathematics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutte_polynomial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutte_polynomial)

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jdnier
"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."

"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."

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andreabedini
Prof Graham Farr of Monash University told Tutte's personal story at my show
once. [http://thelaborastory.com/stories/william-thomas-
tutte/](http://thelaborastory.com/stories/william-thomas-tutte/)

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lotharbot
related:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher)

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kristianp
This page is really hard to read, the text is too light and too thin. See [1].
Not to mention the header is too big.

[1] [http://contrastrebellion.com/](http://contrastrebellion.com/)

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J_Darnley
What a wonderful blank white page. It really tells the story of secret code
breaking. It is still so secret that nobody can know anything about it.

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Tycho
Article doesn't seem to ask/answer any of the obvious questions such as

a) were Enigma and Lorenz related? Did the work to crack one help crack the
other?

b) wasn't the development of computers the main breakthrough at Bletchley?
whose work was the biggest contributor there?

