Speaker: Professor Graham Farr, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University

Attendance is free and open to anyone.

This talk tells the story of Tutte's life, mathematics and code-breaking to a broad audience.

It forms part of a worldwide programme of events to mark the centenary of Tutte's birth, and is being held by the Discrete Mathematics Research Group (a cross-faculty group spanning the School of Mathematical Sciences (Faculty of Science) and the Faculty of Information Technology) in association with the 5th International Combinatorics Conference (5ICC), https://www.monash.edu/5icc/publiclecture.html .

William (Bill) Tutte (1917-2002) became a research mathematician while still an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1930s, broke the toughest Nazi codes while at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, and became one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. His wartime work sparked the secret construction of Colossus, one of the first-ever computers, and saved countless lives. After the war, he led the development of the mathematics of networks, known as Graph Theory. His work was usually inspired by pure curiosity or entertaining puzzles, but has been applied in domains as diverse as electrical circuits, statistical physics and information visualisation.