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