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Trinity College will honour alumnus William (Bill) Tutte with a new work of art in recognition of his achievement deducing the logic and thus functioning of the Lorenz cipher – used by the German High Command for top-secret messages.
Cracking Lorenz – using the world’s first programmable electronic computer – gave the Allies vital intelligence about German military plans and shortened the war by an estimated two years, saving countless lives.
After schooling in Cheveley Village and in Cambridge, in 1935 Tutte came to Trinity with a scholarship to study Natural Sciences, specializing in Chemistry.
He joined the Trinity Mathematical Society, made three firm friends – ‘The Trinity Four’ – who loved solving puzzles, according to Professor Béla Bollobás, Trinity Fellow in Mathematics. The three maths and one chemistry student solved a conundrum thought to be impossible: ‘squaring the square’ – in which a square is divided into numerous squares each of a different size – and published the solution in a leading mathematical journal.
‘The method turned out to be much more significant than the actual result,’ said Professor Bollobás. When war broke out the British Government was eager to recruit clever young minds to the intelligence effort.
‘When they came to ask Patrick Duff [Tutte’s Tutor] who he would recommend, he didn’t recommend the mathematicians,’ said Professor Bollobás. ‘But he recommended Tutte.’
Soon after arriving at Bletchley Park in 1941, Tutte was presented with a new type of encrypted message picked up over the radio waves. These would turn out to be top-secret communications by the German High Command.
Trinity Fellow in Mathematics Professor Imre Leader said:
No-one else could fathom it, so they gave the coded messages to Tutte, not thinking he would come up with anything. His colleagues would see him staring into the distance and ask him, “What are you doing?” because they thought he wasn’t working. He would reply: “I’m thinking.”
He was using his remarkable mathematical abilities to deduce and infer the structure of Lorenz.
To implement Tutte’s solution, GPO engineer Tommy Flowers built Colossus, another incredible achievement at Bletchley Park, which deciphered the highly encrypted ‘Tunny’ messages at speed.
Professor Leader said:
The most remarkable thing was not just that Lorenz was more complex than Enigma, but that Tutte deduced how it worked without ever having seen the machine.
Bletchley Park had an Enigma machine, captured by the Polish, which was famously broken by Alan Turing in January 1940. But they did not have a Lorenz machine.
Professor Bollobás said he was unsurprised when Tutte’s codebreaking became known, in the late 1990s, given his life-long mathematical brilliance.
He is frustrated though by the lack of recognition the rather shy, retiring genius received. In 2012 then Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to the family, paying tribute to Tutte’s work at Bletchley Park. But he never received any honour from the British Government.
Professor Bollobás said:
‘I am sure it’s true that his work shortened or even decided the war. The fact is he broke the code of the German High Command – many of the messages were signed ‘Führer’– which had enormous significance.
The intelligence from decrypted Tunny messages gave the Russians the upper hand at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, the largest tank battle in history, which marked a significant turning point in the war.
It also enabled the British to gauge whether their elaborate disinformation campaign about the Normandy Landings had deceived the Germans – it had – which was vital to the success of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France.
Tutte remains the only academic to have been elected a Fellow of Trinity on the basis of research that had to remain classified.
He went on to work at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, where he was Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization, and a global leader in his field of mathematics. Tutte was inducted as Officer of the Order of Canada in 2001.
