23 Facts About Peter Hilton

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

Peter Hilton was born in Brondesbury, London, the son Mortimer Jacob Hilton, a Jewish physician who was in general practice in Peckham, and his wife Elizabeth Amelia Freedman, and was brought up in Kilburn.

Peter Hilton went to The Queen's College, Oxford in 1940 to read mathematics, on an open scholarship, where the mathematics tutor was Ughtred Haslam-Jones.

Peter Hilton had an interview for mathematicians with knowledge of German, and was offered a position in the Foreign Office without being told the nature of the work.

Peter Hilton worked with several of the Bletchley Park deciphering groups.

Peter Hilton was initially assigned to Naval Enigma in Hut 8.

Peter Hilton commented on his experience working with Alan Turing, whom he knew well for the last 12 years of his life, in his "Reminiscences of Bletchley Park" from A Century of Mathematics in America:.

Peter Hilton echoed similar thoughts in the Nova PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets.

In late 1942, Peter Hilton transferred to work on German teleprinter ciphers.

Peter Hilton's 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.

Peter Hilton has been counted as a member of the Newmanry, possibly on a part-time basis.

Peter Hilton did not use paper or pencil while composing it, but lay on his bed, eyes closed, and assembled it mentally over one night.

Peter Hilton obtained his DPhil in 1949 from Oxford University under the supervision of John Henry Whitehead.

Peter Hilton's dissertation was "Calculation of the homotopy groups of -polyhedra".

Peter Hilton published 15 books and over 600 articles in these areas, some jointly with colleagues.

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

Around 1950, Peter Hilton took a position at the university maths department.

Peter Hilton was there in 1949, when Turing engaged in a discussion that introduced him to the word problem for groups.

In 1952 Hilton moved to DPMMS in Cambridge, England, where he ran a topology seminar attended by John Frank Adams, Michael Atiyah, David B A Epstein, Terry Wall and Christopher Zeeman.

In 1955 Peter Hilton started work with Beno Eckmann on what became known as Eckmann-Peter Hilton duality for the homotopy category.

Peter Hilton moved to the United States in 1962 to be Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, a post he held until 1971.

Peter Hilton died on 6 November 2010 in Binghamton, New York, at age 87.

Peter 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.