14 Facts About Shaun Wylie

Shaun Wylie was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.

Shaun Wylie won a scholarship to New College, Oxford where he studied mathematics and classics.

Shaun Wylie joined Turing's section, Hut 8, which was working on solving the Enigma machine as used by the Kriegsmarine.

Shaun Wylie became head of the crib subsection, and allocated time on the bombe codebreaking machines.

Hugh Alexander, successor to Turing as head of Hut 8, commented that "except for Turing, no-one made a bigger contribution to the success of Hut 8 than Shaun Wylie; he was astonishingly quick and resourceful and contributed to theory and practice in a number of different directions".

Shaun Wylie transferred in Autumn 1943 to work on "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher.

Shaun Wylie married Odette Murray, a WREN in the section.

Shaun Wylie was the PhD advisor for Frank Adams, Max Kelly, Crispin Nash-Williams, William Tutte and Christopher Zeeman.

In July 1969, he was sent a draft paper by James H Ellis, another GCHQ mathematician, about the possibility of what was termed "non-secret encryption", or what is more commonly known as public-key cryptography, on which Wylie commented "unfortunately, I can't see anything wrong with this".

Shaun Wylie retired in 1973, and taught at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys in Cambridge for seven years.

Shaun Wylie was elected an honorary fellow at Trinity Hall in 1980.

Shaun Wylie supervised five PhD students at Cambridge, through whom he had over 1600 "descendants" in 2021 according to the American Mathematical Society Mathematical Genealogy Project.

Shaun Wylie came out of retirement temporarily to teach Mathematics at Long Road Sixth Form College.

Shaun Wylie's eldest son, the late Keith Wylie, a barrister, was a croquet international and open champion of Great Britain.