Talk:W. T. Tutte

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Untitled[edit]

I moved the page from W. T. Tutte to William Thomas Tutte. The beginning of the article was

William Thomas Tutte (May 14, 1917 - May 2, 2002) was a

which indicated that the main title should be the full name. Dbenbenn 06:44, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Why do you say that? Where a full name is not the most common name, policy is to prefer the common name. These things can't be decided in the abstract. Charles Matthews 18:35, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree. He's almost never referred to by his full name. As for the argument that that's how the article starts, that's bogus; if it were, Bill Clinton would be at William Jefferson Clinton. (Not that I agree with the Wikipedia naming policy - I would prefer to see people at their full names, but as long as our policy is "most common form" I'm going to follow it). Noel (talk) 14:45, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Designer of Tunny machine at Bletchley Park[edit]

The BBC mentioned Tutte's design of the Tunny machine for code breaking at Bletchley Park. I quote from the story:

The first Tunny machine was built in 1942 by mathematician Bill Tutte. He drew up plans for it after analysing intercepted encrypted radio signals Hitler was sending to the Nazi high command.
These orders were encrypted before being transmitted by a machine known as a Lorenz SZ42 enciphering machine.
Bill Tutte's work effectively reverse-engineered the workings of the SZ42 - even though he had never seen it.
Tunny worked alongside the early Colossus computer, which calculated the settings of an SZ42 used to scramble a particular message. These settings were reproduced on Tunny, the enciphered message was fed in, and the decrypted text was printed out.
By the end of WWII there were 12-15 Tunny machines in use and the information they revealed about Nazi battle plans aided the Russians during the battle of Kursk and helped to ensure the success of D-Day.
"We have a great deal of admiration for Bill Tutte and those original engineers," said John Whetter.
"There were no standard drawings they could put together," he said. "It was all original thought and it was incredible what they achieved."

 Kiefer.Wolfowitz 11:37, 28 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this BBC item seems to contradict the article, where we have 'Tunny' as the German machine. 220.246.49.174 (talk) 10:30, 30 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The word "Tunny" was initially applied to one of the radio telegraph links that used Lorenz SZ42 machines, then it was used for the machine itself. (The first time that anyone on the allied side saw one of the machines and learned its true identity was in 1945, after Germany had surrendered.) Tutte's work produced a functional description of the machine and GPO engineers at their research department produced one machine and later a number of machines that functioned according to Tutte's description. These machine were therefore used to translate ciphertext into plaintext German when the correct wheel settings had been established. These machines were also called "Tunny", but to avoid confusion, a number of authors refer to them as "British Tunny"--TedColes (talk) 18:07, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation[edit]

How is his name said? I don't think it is obvious. 131.111.145.40 (talk) 09:54, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Good Question. The BBC pronounced it 'toot' in several of their documentaries. However, in the short video that Tony Sale made about the breaking of Fish and the design of the Tunny machine, he pronounced it 'tut'. Methinks, that as Tony Sale actually worked with the guy, he is more likely to know how he pronounced his name. 109.156.49.202 (talk) 14:31, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

About cliques[edit]

My personal favorite of Tuttes theroems that I've read is his proof in the 1960's that the line graph (ie representing edges as points) of any given graph has a reduction to interconnected cliques (ie K-complete factors). In other words whether or not any given graph is the line graph of some other graph is decidable if it can be factored into cliques -- being an NP-hard problem in computer science (whereas maximum clique size for a graph is merely NP-complete).

Photograph?[edit]

I have a reasonable photograph of Tutte which I cropped from a photograph of the Trinity Mathematical Society, 1938, which I inherited from my uncle. I've seen the same photograph on the web at http://www.squaring.net/history_theory/brooks_smith_stone_tutte.html, but it is of inferior quality, being corrupted with vertical stripes. I was wondering if it would be appropriate to contribute this photograph, and if so, how I would go about putting it up? I was able to get a decent image using a digital SLR; it's not perfect, of course, being a severe crop of the picture, but better than the one at the above website. The same picture appeared in the BBC documentary about Tutte and Flowers' work at Bletchley park, and the close-up of Tutte shows the same vertical striping, which makes me think there may not be too many copies of this photograph around. If anyone thinks this would be a useful addition to the page, let me know via a reply Alan1507 (talk) 12:44, 10 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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Fish (cryptography)[edit]

Maybe I am still half asleep but I don't see any mention of the code name Fish in this article.

See Lorenz cipher, Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher and Fish (cryptography)

Broadly speaking, what the eccentric mathematical genius Alan Turing did for Enigma, Bill Tutte did for cracking the Lorenz cipher, codenamed "Fish" by the British. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/may/10/guardianobituaries.obituaries

The codebreakers named the Lorenz cipher system Tunny, and all of the teleprinter links were given the name of fish. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11231608/Breaking-the-Enigma-code-was-the-easiest-part-of-the-Nazi-puzzle.html

Peter K Burian (talk) 13:20, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also: this article also does not mention John Tiltman?
But, in an extraordinary piece of analysis, John Tiltman, possibly the greatest British codebreaker ever, and Bill Tutte, a recently recruited chemistry and maths graduate, managed to work out the internal mechanisms. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11231608/Breaking-the-Enigma-code-was-the-easiest-part-of-the-Nazi-puzzle.html Peter K Burian (talk) 13:30, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I've added mention of "Fish". Tiltman is linked in the section "Diagnosing the cipher machine". --TedColes (talk) 16:11, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, TedColes Peter K Burian (talk) 16:14, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Date of first deciphering[edit]

It will be nice to know when the real deciphering starts. 201.188.167.18 (talk) 03:53, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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