William Thomas Tutte was a distinguished mathematician and codebreaker born on May 14, 1917 in Newmarket, England to modest circumstances, with his father working as a gardener and his mother as the caretaker at Fitzroy House. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1935 where he initially studied chemistry and achieved First Class Honours, though his primary passion lay in mathematics as evidenced by his active participation in the Trinity Mathematical Society. During World War II, Tutte accepted an invitation to join the codebreaking team at Bletchley Park where he made one of the most significant contributions to Allied intelligence efforts without ever having seen the machine he was decoding. His mathematical brilliance would eventually establish him as a foundational figure in combinatorics and graph theory, shaping the academic landscape at the University of Waterloo for decades to come.
Tutte's most remarkable achievement was his work at Bletchley Park in 1941 where he deduced the complete logical structure of the German Lorenz cipher machine solely from intercepted messages, a feat that directly led to the development of COLOSSUS, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer. His mathematical breakthroughs in codebreaking are credited with shortening World War II by approximately two years, thereby saving countless lives while establishing fundamental principles in cryptanalysis. In pure mathematics, Tutte made seminal contributions to graph theory and matroid theory, including his famous characterization of graphs with perfect matchings, his work on Hamiltonian circuits, and his innovative solution to the "squaring the square" problem through applications of electrical network theory. His doctoral thesis "An Algebraic Theory of Graphs" laid the foundation for modern matroid theory, with his characterization of regular matroids in terms of excluded minors becoming one of the deepest results in the field.
After the war, Tutte completed his doctorate at Cambridge in 1948 and joined the University of Toronto before moving to the University of Waterloo in 1962, where he became instrumental in founding the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, establishing Waterloo as a global center for discrete mathematics. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory until his retirement in 1985, maintaining an active role as an emeritus professor and continuing to influence generations of mathematicians until his death. Recognized as "the leading world figure in graph and matroid theories," Tutte's work established fundamental results across multiple domains including matching theory, connectivity, symmetry in graphs, reconstruction, and graph polynomials. His legacy endures through his influential textbooks including "Connectivity in Graphs" and "Graph Theory," and through the countless mathematicians he inspired during his quiet but profoundly impactful career. The University of Waterloo continues to honor his contributions, with his theoretical frameworks remaining foundational to modern combinatorial mathematics and theoretical computer science.
