Not a question everybody asks, but it seems a fair one to pose to the National Cipher Challenge community. To be clear, I don’t mean, “Am I, Harry, a mathematician”. I am not even sure if mythical beings can be classified like that. No, I mean, who can call themselves a mathematician.
I was prompted to ask this by the book “100 People You Never Knew Were at BLETCHLEY PARK” written by Sinclair McKay, which contains accounts of people from every walk of life who contributed to the efforts of the Government Codes and Cypher School during the war. Among them I found Bill Tutte, who I know from the field of Graph Theory, having been taught Tutte’s Theorem as an undergraduate. You can read about it on Wikipedia, which is surprisingly good for mathematics!
The reason this caught my eye is that Bill is described in the book as a Chemist, and indeed he studied Chemistry at Trinity College Cambridge (coincidentally one of our partners in the National Cipher Challenge). It is perhaps not so surprising that a chemist would be interested in graphs, as they provide a good model for chemical bonds, but I suspect that actually Bill’s interest arose because of his work on the Lorenz cipher, Hitler’s most secure encryption system. It was used to encode messages between the very highest of High Command, and it is a miracle that the machine was ever broken.
Bill, working entirely without ever seeing a Lorenz machine, managed to work out how it operated to such a high level of detail that the team led by Max Newman could build a replica capable of cracking the Lorenz ciphers.
Bill Tutte was not alone in discovering latent mathematical ability at Bletchley and provides a useful reminder that mathematics and mathematicians are to be found everywhere and in all walks of life.
If you have broken one of the ciphers in this year’s competition, or even just tried, then I think it is fair to say that in some measure you ARE a mathematician. What you do with that is up to you!
