Shaun Wylie
Shaun Wylie ( born January 17, 1913 in Oxford, † 2 October 2009) was a British mathematician (topology ) and cryptologist.
Life and work
Wylie attended Winchester College and then studied with a scholarship gained mathematics and classical languages at Oxford University ( New College ). In 1937 he received his doctorate with a thesis on topology at Princeton University under Solomon Lefschetz ( Duality and intersection in general complexes ). 1938/1939 he was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, where he also after the Second World War, which he spent as Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, returned. In 1958, he was Chief Actuary of GCHQ ( Government Communications Headquarters ), the British cryptography agency. In 1973 he retired and taught after seven years of mathematics and Greek at the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (now Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge ). He was also involved in the founding of the British Socialist (Social Democratic Party ), and in a university for retirees in Cambridge ( University of the Third Age ) is active, where he lectured Greek tragedies in the original language, shortly before his death with partners.
To work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, he was invited by Alan Turing in 1940, when he was a tutor at Wellington College. It was Turing's Hut 8 allocated, where he led the Crib department that was looking into the Enigma ciphertexts for suspected plaintext words ( Cribs ). According to the successor of Turing in the line of Hut 8, Hugh Alexander, Wylie was the most important after Turing Department staff, amazingly fast and the most versatile (best all-rounder ). In general, he was called there Doc Wiley. In autumn 1943, he moved to the department that the German Lorenz cipher machine ( with the British Tunny called ) finally cracked that was used for secret communications of the highest places.
In 1980 he became Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall. He was an accomplished chess and bridge players and formerly active hockey player who represented Scotland in 1938 internationally. For The Listener, he composed crossword, wyliecoat under the pseudonym.
Among his students Erik Christopher Zeeman, William Tutte and John Frank Adams.
He was married (his wife Odette Murray, he learned at Bletchley Park know ) and had three sons and a daughter.
Writings
- With Peter Hilton: Homology theory - an introduction to algebraic topology. Cambridge University Press 1960, 1967.