

Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park - justin_hancock
http://billtuttememorialfund.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/bill-who/

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kenrose
I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Tutte give a talk in one of my
undergraduate classes. It was Fall 2001 and I was a lowly undergrad at UW
taking Math 249, the "advanced" requisite combinatorics course. I believe Dr.
Tutte was a professor emeritus at the time and came to campus about once a
week. Since our class was small, our prof asked us if we'd like to have Dr.
Tutte give a talk. To be honest, I'd never heard about him before that, but
the idea of having a math prof who helped fight Nazis come in was kind of
awesome.

I still remember that talk to this day. The actual content of the talk was
very interesting (he talked about his work at Bletchley Park, coming to
Canada, his research at UW), but what has stuck most in my mind all these
years was what I can only call his aura. Even at 80+ years old, he was a
captivating speaker and all ~ 20 of us kids in that class were slack-jawed,
hanging off our seat, listening to every word, in awe of him and what he did,
especially since he wasn't that much older than any of us were when he did it.

I later did work with mesh parameterization and was delighted to find out that
his work was considered seminal (the planar embedding theorem and the so
called "Tutte weights"). He made a lot of contributions and published a lot of
material, so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that my area of research
intersected with his. It was a nice feeling to be able to reference him
though.

To his memory.

~~~
Graham24
I was fortunate enough to go to Blethcley about ten-ish years back when the
war time crpytanalysts were doing guided tours (do they still do that?). I
forget the name of the bloke who escorted our group around, but it was well
known in connection to the place.

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antimagic
There's a good book out - [http://www.amazon.com/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-
code-breaki...](http://www.amazon.com/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-code-
breaking-
computers/dp/0199578141/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369739635&sr=8-1&keywords=colossus+copeland)

The book talks about Tutte and Flowers and how they went about building the
world's first true computer. It includes schematics and algorithms and other
technical details of the machine. Actually, if you're old enough, you probably
remember getting told in your first CompSci classes how computers were made up
of I/O, a CPU and memory, which even by the 1980s seemed like a quaint way of
viewing things. Reading Colussus for the first time, you really understand why
they made the distinction in the textbooks. Just the machines to read and
write to paper tape were incredibly complicated, and the speed that you could
spool paper tape was a limiting factor in the early days. Indeed the first
systems didn't really have a memory system, they had to keep re-reading data
from tapes. The need to avoid that was the reason they invented memory in the
first place - it sped up computer operations by orders of magnitude!

The book also covers in great detail how they went about _intercepting_ the
signals from the German High Command - which itself was a very modern digital
modulation scheme that hadn't existed until them. The work of the signals
interceptors was very impressive too, and run by the British Post Office, if
my memory serves correctly :D

~~~
jgrahamc
If my memory serves, the German High Command were using teleprinters and were
sending the teleprinter signals via radio. This did sound totally different
from Morse (which was used for other signals, such as those encrypted with
Engima), but I don't think this was very new.

The transmission technology was RTTY (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTTY>)
which was active well before the Second World War. It would have sounded odd
to Morse operators, but would have been recognizable and easily decoded as it
is just FSK.

~~~
antimagic
It's been a while since I read the book, but I thought the modulation scheme
was a form of QAM, which was new at the time. The book certainly emphasizes
that it took the interceptors quite some time to realise what they were
seeing. Still, my memory of the details is a bit fuzzy, and I know that you
have researched this area quite extensively, so I defer to greater knowledge
;)

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mzl
Another interesting code breaker during WWII was the Swede Arne Beurling
(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Beurling>). He reverse-engineered the
Sturgeon cipher from intercepted enrypted texts using pen and paper only,
enabling Sweden to break the cipher systematically.

On the other hand, this had little impact on WWII as a whole, so it is not as
important as the code breaking done at Bletchley park.

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mrzasa
Don't forget about people who were breakine enigma 'before it was cool', and
they succeed: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_%28cryptography%29>,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski>.

~~~
jgrahamc
True, but this story has nothing to do with Engima.

~~~
willvarfar
Can you please clarify what you mean?

~~~
ColinWright
The story about Bill Tutte has nothing to do with Enigma. Yes, Bill Tutte
worked at Bletchley, and so did the code breakers who worked on Enigma.

But Tutte worked on Lorenz, and this story is about Tutte and his work, and
hence this story is not about Enigma.

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iqster
I was fortunate to have dinner with him once when he visited our University
(sadly, this was close to the time of his death). He was a pretty sweet old
man. I recall he was very humble and a vegetarian. I had no clue he was so
accomplished until I took a graph theory course in grad school!

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ColinWright
How I wish I could upvote this more than once. One of my heroes - wonderful
mathematician, phenomenally clever, incredibly modest.

His Wikipedia page is definitely worth a read to get a more balanced picture
of the scope of his work:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779247>

~~~
jgrahamc
Agreed. And also everyone talks about Enigma but in many ways it was the end
of the line of cryptosystems.

The Lorenz cipher that Tutte broke is much closer to today's ciphers. It was a
pseudo-random number generator whose output was XORed with the message to be
enciphered (which had been converted to Baudot code):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher>

Very similar to RC4, for example.

And Lorenz worked by exploiting co-primality to achieve a long key stream.

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poindontcare
Also a contributor to discrete math while teaching in at waterloo (graph
theory and combinatorics):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte#Doctorate_and_caree...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte#Doctorate_and_career)

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stiff
Hear you can hear the man himself speak (RealPlayer and a lengthy boring
introduction though, not for the impatient)

<http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/audio/01-02/CRM-Fields/tutte/>

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alcuadrado
Whenever someone talks about Alan Turing as just a "code breaker" I cry a
little

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ggchappell
Interesting. I'm familiar with Tutte's work in graph theory & matroid theory.
I had no idea he'd been at Bletchley Park. He seems to have done an awful lot
of very significant work.

