The Story
During his early schooling, Tutte became fascinated by prime numbers, as well as by articles on astronomy and other sciences in a children’s encyclopedia. He studied the natural sciences at Cambridge University in England, but became more and more interested in mathematics. His experience cracking secret codes during World War II gained him a fellowship at Trinity College where he became particularly well known for his papers on Graph Theory — the mathematics of the combinations of connections between points on a plane or in other dimensions. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto from 1948 to 1962, then fellow mathematician, H.M.S. Coxeter, helped him get a post at University of Waterloo, Ontario, where he worked until retirement in 1985. He is the author of several books including Graph Theory As I Have Known It, reissued in August 1998.
Read about Dr. Tutte's work on cryptography in the 1940's, when he tackled a complex German code which his team called FISH.
Sources: In Celebration of Scientists; Canadian Who’s Who 1993; Image: Dr Tutte's website
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The Person
- Birthdate
- May 14, 1917
- Birthplace
- Newmarket, England
- Title
- Mathematician; Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Department of Combinatorics and Optimization
- Office
- University of Waterloo
- Status
- Retired
- Degrees
-
- BA, Cambridge, 1938
- MSc, Cambridge, 1941
- PhD, Cambridge, 1948
- Awards
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- Tory Medal (Royal Society of Canada), 1975
- Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize, 1982
- Fellow, Royal Society of London, 1987
- Last Updated
- September 17, 2015
- Popularity
- 39258
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