Peter Hilton


Peter John Hilton was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during the Second World War.

Early life

Hilton was born in London, the son of Elizabeth Amelia and Mortimer Jacob Hilton, and was educated at St Paul's School. He won a scholarship to the Queen's College, Oxford in 1940.

Career

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. 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.
He was initially put to work on Naval Enigma in Hut 8. In late 1942, he transferred to work on German teleprinter ciphers. 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. 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. Occasionally the same message was sent repeated, a major security blunder that 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.
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".
Hilton recounted his experience working with Alan Turing in Hut 8 in his "Reminiscences of Bletchley Park" from A Century of Mathematics in America:Hilton echoed similar thoughts in the Nova PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets.
In 1958, he became the Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. He moved to the United States in 1962 to be Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, a post he held until 1971. 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. On 1 September 1972, he was appointed Louis D. Beaumont University Professor at Case Western Reserve University; on 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."
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.

Hilton's theorem

Named after Hilton is Hilton's theorem on the homotopy groups of a wedge of spheres.

Death

Peter Hilton died in Binghamton, New York, United States, 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.

Academic positions