Mathematician:William Thomas Tutte

Mathematician

English codebreaker and mathematician working on the foundations of graph theory and matroid theory.

Made a fundamental breakthrough in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, which contributed significantly to the defeat of Germany in the Second World War.

Nationality

English

History

• Born: 14 May 1917 in Newmarket, Suffolk, England
• Died: 2 May 2002 in Waterloo, Canada

Theorems and Definitions

• BEST Theorem (with Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, Tatyana Pavlovna van Aardenne-Ehrenfest and Cedric Austen Bardell Smith)
• Hanani-Tutte Theorem (with Haim Hanani)
• Peripheral Cycle
• Tutte 12-Cage
• Tutte Embedding
• Tutte Graph
• Tutte Homotopy Theorem
• Tutte Matrix
• Tutte Polynomial
• Tutte Theorem
• Tutte-Berge Formula (with Claude Jacques Berge)
• Tutte-Coxeter Graph (with Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter)
• Tutte-Grothendieck Invariant (with Alexander Grothendieck)
• Tutte's 1+2 Break In
• Tutte's 1-Factor Theorem
• Tutte's Fragment
• Tutte's Linking Theorem
• Tutte's Planarity Criterion
• Tutte's Statistical Method
• Tutte's Triangle Lemma
• Tutte's Unimodular Representation Theorem
• Tutte's Wheel Theorem

Results named for William Thomas Tutte can be found here.

Definitions of concepts named for William Thomas Tutte can be found here.

Publications

• 1948: An Algebraic Theory of Graphs

Sources

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "William Thomas Tutte": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive