The Monument
At the given co-ordinates there is a square made up of smaller stone squares set into the pavement (see Gallery). If you stand there and look toward the perforated upright metal panels of the monument you will see a face emerge from the ‘random’ pattern of drilled holes.
You have just ‘decoded’ the face of mathematician and codebreaker William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC (1917-2002) whose ‘breaking’ of the German Lorenz code at Bletchley Park was described as “one of the greatest intellectual feats of the Second World War”.
The ‘Intellectual Warrior’
You have probably heard of codebreaker Alan Turing and the cracking of ‘Enigma’, which enabled the Allies to read radio communications between individual German military units, submarines etc.
Enigma provided very valuable information, but the ‘greatest’ codebreakers prize was be to gaining access to top-secret, high-level communications transmitted between members of the German Wehrmacht High Command, including Hitler himself.
These strategic German messages were encrypted, letter-by-letter, using Lorenz cipher machines (codenamed ‘Tunny’ by the British) which were significantly more sophisticated than Enigma and which the Nazis believed to be ‘unbreakable’. This is what a Lorenz cipher machine looked like:
Unlike Enigma, which was cracked with the help of several mechanical Enigma machines already in Allied possession, Lorenz was a far tougher challenge since nobody on the Allied side had even seen a Lorenz machine and its workings were a mystery.
So, in Summer 1941, with nothing more than the encrypted messages themselves to work on, Bill Tutte amazingly managed to identify and analyse patterns in the code and so achieved the stunning feat of producing a complete understanding of the logic-structure of the Lorenz machine and the multi-layered way in which it worked!
Even so, to decrypt any individual message it was still necessary to work out which one of the many, many billion possible Lorenz machine setting combinations had been used to encrypt it.
Undeterred, Bill next worked out methods (algorithms) to find the settings, and these were used to program Colossus, the world’s very first electronic computer, to do the task. Meet Colossus:
Thanks to Bill Tutte and Colossus, Lorenz messages were decrypted in quantity and fast. It’s said that Allied military intelligence may even have been reading some of them before Hitler himself!
The Allies now had a window into the innermost thoughts of the German High Command, and with that knowledge the War in Europe was brought to an end significantly sooner than it might have been and innumerable lives saved as a result.
For example, in the run-up to D-Day deciphered Lorenz messages confirmed that Allied deception campaigns had convinced Hitler that the landings were coming near Calais and as a result he had refused to release Panzer units to defend the Normandy beaches.
Bill’s story shows that wars can not only be fought with ‘blood, sweat and tears’ but also with stunning intellect.
Bill’s Life
Bill was the younger son of William John Tutte, an estate gardener, and Annie, a housekeeper. Both worked at Fitzroy House stables in Newmarket where Tutte was born. He went to school in Cheveley and then the Cambridge High School for Boys, and in 1935 won a scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge where he graduated with first-class honours in 1938.
Soon after WW2 broke out Tutte was recruited to the Research Section of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. At first, he worked on a code used by the Italian Navy and was transferred to project ‘Fish’ in 1941 where he worked on Lorenz/Tunny.
Bill contributed to numerous important aspects of Mathematics during his life including ‘Solving the square’ (there’s a plaque at this monument telling you more about this) and aspects of ‘Graph theory’.
Following the war he moved to Canada and spent the rest of his career as a Professor of Mathematics.
The monument was inaugurated in 2014.
TO LOG THIS CACHE:
There are two curved wooden/metal benches at the monument. Each has, on the end panel, a circular commemorative plaque.
One plaque honours Tommy Flowers MBE, the GPO engineer who designed ‘Colossus’ - the world’s first programmable electronic computer - an epic achievement in itself!
To log the cache:
Find the other circular commemorative plaque and email or message us the name of who it commemorates including rank and honours. You do not need to wait before logging the cache. We will contact you if there is a problem.
We are very grateful to our good friend ryo62 for the opportunity for us to create this Virtual cache in honour of Bill Tutte and his place in our history.
Virtual Rewards 4.0 - 2024-2025
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between January 17, 2024 and January 17, 2025. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 4.0 on the Geocaching Blog.