May 13, 2002

Remembering A Canadian Math Hero The Globe and Mail has the obituary of William Tutte a mathematician who broke the German secret code known as Fish during World War Two. This code was very important since it was used solely by the German High Command. Unlike the breaking of the Enigma code, Tuttle did not have access to the machine used in the encoding and decoding of the messages, all work was done by examining messages and looking for patterns in them. Following the war Tuttle was sworn to secrecy and did not tell his colleagues in Britain and later the University of Toronto and then the University of Waterloo until his role was revealed in 1997. I was fortunate to attend his first public lecture on the matter, "Fish and I" in 1998 at the opening of the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research. 11:07:55 PM

Salon has an article on how certain California high schools are banning students from their graduation ceremonies unless they have signed up for post-secondary education or other acceptable areas such as the military. People who want to take time off to travel or work must graduate in private to reflect the belief that they are failures. 12:39:03 AM