Peter Hilton

This article is about the British mathematician. For the Lord-Lieutenant of Derbyshire, see Peter Hilton (lord-lieutenant).
Peter Hilton
Born Peter John Hilton
(1923-04-07)7 April 1923
London, England, UK
Died 6 November 2010(2010-11-06) (aged 87)
Binghamton, New York, U.S.
Fields Mathematician
Alma mater The Queen's College, Oxford

Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923[1] – 6 November 2010[2]) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during the Second World War.[3]

Life and career

Hilton was born in London, the son of Elizabeth Amelia (Freedman) and Mortimer Jacob Hilton, and was educated at St Paul's School.[4][5][6] He won a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford in 1940.[4]

During the Second World War, as an undergraduate, Hilton was obliged to enroll in training with the Royal Artillery, and was scheduled for conscription in summer 1942.[7] Instead, he was interviewed by a team touring universities looking for mathematicians with knowledge of German, and was offered a position in the Foreign Office without being told the nature of the work. The team was, in fact, recruiting on behalf of the Government Code and Cypher School. He accepted, and, aged 18, arrived at wartime codebreaking station Bletchley Park on 12 January 1942.[8]

He was initially put to work on Naval Enigma in Hut 8. In late 1942, he transferred to work on German teleprinter ciphers.[7] A special section known as the "Testery" had been formed in July 1942 to work on one such cipher, codenamed "Tunny", and Hilton was one of the early members of the group.[9] His role was to devise ways to deal with changes in Tunny, and to liaise with another section working on Tunny, the "Newmanry", which complemented the hand-methods of the Testery with specialised codebreaking machinery.[9] Occasionally the same message was sent repeated, a major security blunder which Bletchley park called a "depth." Hilton derived great satisfaction from being able to look at the encoded texts coming from two separate teleprinter messages, combine them and extract two messages in clear German.[10][11] Hilton obtained his DPhil in 1949 from Oxford University under the supervision of John Henry Whitehead. His dissertation was titled, "Calculation of the Homotopy Groups of An2-polyhedra".[12]

In 1958, he became the Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Birmingham.[4] He moved to the United States in 1962 to be Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, a post he held until 1971.[1] From 1971 to 1973, he held a joint appointment as Fellow of the Battelle Seattle Research Center and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. 1 September 1972, he was appointed Louis D. Beaumont University Professor at Case Western Reserve University. 1 September 1973, he took up the appointment. In 1982, he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Binghamton University, becoming Emeritus in 2003. Latterly he spent each spring semester as Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Central Florida.

Hilton constructed the 51-letter palindrome, "Doc note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."[13]

Hilton's principal research interests were in algebraic topology, homological algebra, categorical algebra and mathematics education. He published 15 books and over 600 articles in these areas, some jointly with colleagues.

Hilton is featured in Mathematical People.[14]

He died in Binghamton, New York at age 87.

In popular culture

Hilton is portrayed by actor Matthew Beard in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which tells the tale of Alan Turing and the cracking of Nazi Germany's Enigma code.

Additional academic positions

Professional memberships

Honours

Positions held

Recent positions

Books

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Peter Hilton, "On all Sorts of Automorphisms", The American Mathematical Monthly, 92(9), November 1985, p. 650
  2. ↑ Obituaries: Peter Hilton, November 8, 2010, retrieved 9 November 2010
  3. ↑ Pedersen, Jean (2011). "Peter Hilton: Code Breaker and Mathematician (1923-2010)" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 58 (11): 1538–1540.
  4. 1 2 3 "About the speaker", announcement of a lecture given by Peter Hilton at Bletchley Park on 12 July 2006, accessed 18 January 2007.
  5. ↑ http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/dec/02/peter-hilton-obituary
  6. ↑ http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/102834
  7. 1 2 Peter Hilton, "Living with Fish: Breaking Tunny in the Newmanry and the Testery", p. 190 from pp. 189-203 in Jack Copeland ed, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  8. ↑ Hilton, "Living with Fish", p. 189
  9. 1 2 Jerry Roberts, "Major Tester's Section", p. 250 of pp. 249-259 in Jack Copeland ed, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  10. ↑ "Professor Peter Hilton". Sunday Telegraph. 14 November 2010. Retrieved 14 November 2010.
  11. ↑ "Station X" (Television Documentary). Channel 4. 1999.
  12. ↑ David Joyner and David Kahn, editors, "Edited Transcript of Interview with Peter Hilton for Secrets of War", in Cryptologia 30(3), July–September 2006, pp. 236–250.
  13. ↑ Jack Good, "Enigma and Fish", p. 160 from pp. 149-166 in F. H. Hinsley and Alan Strip, editors, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, 1993.
  14. ↑ D. Albers and G.L. Alexanderson, Mathematical People, Birkhauser, Boston, 1995. ISBN 0-8176-3191-7
  15. ↑ Contemporary Mathematics 37, AMS, 1985
  16. ↑ Curtis, M. L. (1954). "Review: An introduction to homotopy theory, by P. J. Hilton". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 60 (2): 182–185. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1954-09797-5.
  17. ↑ Massey, W. S. (1964). "Review: An introduction to algebraic topology, by P. J. Hilton and S. Wylie". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 70 (3): 333–335. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1964-11085-5.

Hilton's former PhD students

External links

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