During the Second World War, what vital role was played by William Tutte (pictured)?

William Thomas Tutte (1917-2002) was one of the most valuable and brilliant codebreakers employed at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire in Southern England during the Second World War. Whilst we now, entirely rightly, celebrate the vital achievements of his colleague Alan Turing, until fairly recently Tutte has been somewhat overlooked.

He had humble origins, and both his parents were in service - his father as a gardener, and his mother as a housekeeper in Suffolk in East Anglia. But he passed a scholarship exam to grammar school, and then to the illustrious Trinity College in Cambridge. He originally studied chemistry, but then turned his attention to mathematics, where along with colleagues, he worked on a geometric conundrum known as "squaring the square" (interestingly, using a female pseudonym).

Not long after the outbreak of war, he was seconded to Bletchley Park, and after initially working on an Italian code, turned to the German code known as "Tunnyfish" and operated by the Lorenz machine, even more fiendish than the famous Enigma one.

After the war he returned to the academic world as an eminent mathematician, celebrated for his work on Graph Theory.