Peter Hilton - Life

Life

Hilton was born in London, and educated at St Paul's School. He won a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford in 1940.

During World War II, as an undergraduate, Hilton was obliged to enrol 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 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 which Bletchley park called a "depth." Hilton derived great satisfaction from being able to look at the encoded texts coming from two separate teleprinters and from them work out the original German text.

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 A_n2-polyhedra".

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. September 1, 1972, he was appointed Louis D. Beaumont University Professor at Case Western Reserve University. September 1, 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.

He died in Binghamton, New York.