Shaun Wylie

Shaun Wylie was a British mathematician and Second World War codebreaker, born in Oxford in 1913, the fourth son of Sir Francis Wylie, the first Warden of Rhodes House. He studied mathematics and classics at New College, Oxford, then went to Princeton in 1934 to study topology and began research under Solomon Lefschetz, where he met Alan Turing, and was in practice advised by Albert Tucker. At Bletchley Park from 1941 he joined Turing's Hut 8 on the naval Enigma, headed its crib subsection and allocated time on the bombe machines, then moved in 1943 to the Tunny cipher, and in 1945 showed how Colossus could break the Tunny motor wheels. After the war he lectured at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was doctoral advisor to Frank Adams, Max Kelly, Crispin Nash-Williams, William Tutte and Christopher Zeeman. With Peter Hilton he wrote a textbook on homology theory. From 1958 he was Chief Mathematician at GCHQ and after retiring in 1973 he taught school mathematics in Cambridge. He died in 2009.