Shaun Wylie
International hockey player and Bletchley Park cryptanalyst, who became GCHQ Chief Mathematician
Shaun Wylie was born in Oxford on the 17th January 1913 and would go on to graduate from New College before heading to Princeton University where he obtained a PhD in 1937 for his studies in topology. He returned to the UK and was teaching at Wellington College when, in 1940, he was invited by Alan Turing, whom he had met at Princeton, to come and work at Bletchley Park.
In January 1941 Wylie joined the team in Hut 8 and put in charge of the Crib room. He was notable for spotting the tendency for all Enigma wheels on one day to be different from those of the previous day. This aid to Enigma analysis was subsequently known as the 'Wylie WOs' (Wheel Orders). He also devised the 'Wylie Box', a wooden frame in which inverse rods could be arranged according to any desired stecker to determine rod pairings.
Wylie was transferred to the Newmanry (at that stage in Hut 11) in September 1943 to become one of the Shift Duty Officers there, responsible for TUNNY, the online telecipher machine used by the German High Command, where he stayed until the end of the war. He produced the 'Wylie's Cryptographic Dictionary' essentially a working aid for cryptographers at Bletchley.
He was a man of many talents. He was an international hockey player for Scotland and a winner of the Bletchley Park Home Guard unarmed combat competition(!), as well as being President of the Bletchley Drama Group.
After the war he lectured at Trinity Hall, and then returned to GCHQ in September 1958 as Chief Mathematician, a post he held until August 1973 when he retired from the Civil Service. Wylie died on the 2nd October 2009 aged 96.