University of Waterloo

2001-02-06 00:00:00

Math pioneer Bill Tutte given institute honour

WATERLOO, Ont. -- A pioneering leader in the field of graph and matroid theories, University of Waterloo mathematician Bill Tutte, has been awarded the 2001 CRM-Fields Institute Prize for his research accomplishments.

Early on in his distinguished career, a young Tutte played a key role during the Second World War in cracking the intelligence codes used by Hitler's high command.

Now retired, Tutte is a distinguished professor emeritus in combinatorics and optimization at UW. For the past 60 years, he has worked in graph theory and related areas of discrete math.

The $5,000 prize, awarded by the Centre de recherches mathematiques in Montreal and the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto, honours Tutte as "the leading world figure in graph and matroid theories."

Tutte is credited with performing groundbreaking work in several new areas that were later to grow into major fields of discrete math.

In a letter of nomination suggesting Tutte for the award, Prof. Bill Cunningham, chair of UW's Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, and Prof. Daniel Younger give examples of his work:

"In graph theory he established fundamental results for matching, connectivity, symmetry in graphs, reconstruction, colouring, Hamiltonian circuits, graphs on higher surfaces, graph enumeration and graph polynomials.

"In matroid theory, he is the single most important pioneer. One deep result is his characterization of regular matroids in terms of excluded minors. Another is his characterization of graphic matroids. These have provided the foundation for substantial structural work in this area."

Born in Newmarket, Britain, Tutte was educated at Cambridge University. After receiving his PhD from Cambridge in 1948, he came to Canada to join the faculty of the University of Toronto. Tutte moved to UW in 1962, just five years after its founding.

A leading figure in the establishment of UW's Faculty of Mathematics in 1967, Tutte was named honorary director of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR) in 1998.

"The reason why he was made honorary director of the CACR was that he had an important role in the highly successful British effort to crack the German codes during the Second World War," Cunningham explained.

Tutte served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory in its early years, and as a member of editorial boards of a number of other research journals. He is a fellow both of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Society of London.

Tutte, who was honoured with a symposium at UW on his 80th birthday in 1997, will present a lecture at the CRM and at the Fields Institute this year.

UW is one of the Fields Institute's principal sponsoring universities, along with the University of Toronto, York University and McMaster University.