RIP Professor Peter Hilton

[The Straight Story]

Professor Peter Hilton

Professor Peter Hilton, who died on November 6 aged 87, played a key role in the secret wartime codebreaking agency at Bletchley Park and went on to become one of the most influential mathematicians of the postwar generation.


In 1941 Hilton was a young Oxford undergraduate when he was recruited to Bletchley to work in a section known as the Testery (after its head, a linguist called Major Ralph Tester). His colleagues there were Alan Turing; Roy Jenkins (the future Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer); Peter Benenson (who later founded Amnesty International); and Hugh Alexander, the British chess champion. Also there was Donald Michie, a young Oxford classics scholar who became a professor of artificial intelligence and whose various claims to fame included the post of curator of the Balliol Book of Bawdy Verse.

Hilton initially worked with Turing on breaking German naval codes produced by Enigma machines, and concentrated on top secret Offizier messages (for officers' eyes only). His extraordinary powers of visualisation meant that in his mind's eye he could unpick streams of characters from two separate teleprinters – a faculty that was to prove invaluable in the feverish mental chess game with the enemy.

Success rates were high and decryption was accomplished at remarkable speed. At the end of 1942 he was moved to work with a group of some 30 mathematicians on the yet more sophisticated code which the Germans had started using in 1940 to encrypt top-secret messages – mainly between Hitler and his generals.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/8124447/Professor-Peter-Hilton.html

[MissMarple]

1. Thank you, Professor Hilton.