He 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.[4][5] The physiologist Sidney Montague Hilton (1921–2011) of the
University of Birmingham Medical School was his elder brother.[6]
A wartime undergraduate in wartime Oxford, on a shortened course, Hilton was obliged to train with the
Royal Artillery, and faced scheduled
conscription in summer 1942.[10] After four terms, he took the advice of his tutor, and followed up a civil service recruitment contact.[4] He 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. The team was, in fact, recruiting on behalf of the
Government Code and Cypher School. Aged 18, he arrived at the
codebreaking station
Bletchley Park on 12 January 1942.[11]
Hilton worked with several of the Bletchley Park deciphering groups. He was initially assigned to Naval
Enigma in
Hut 8. 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:[12]
It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement.
Hilton echoed similar thoughts in the Nova
PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets (UK Station X, Channel 4, 1999).[13]
In late 1942, Hilton transferred to work on German
teleprinter ciphers.[10] 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 the early members of the group.[14] 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.[14] Hilton has been counted as a member of the Newmanry, possibly on a part-time basis.[15]
Recreational
A convivial pub drinker at Bletchley Park, Hilton also spent time with Turing working on
chess problems and
palindromes.[16] He there constructed a 51-letter palindrome:[17]
"Doc note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."
Mathematics
Hilton obtained his
DPhil in 1949 from
Oxford University under the supervision of
John Henry Whitehead. His dissertation was "Calculation of the homotopy groups of -polyhedra".[18][19] His 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's theorem (1955) is on the
homotopy groups of a
wedge of
spheres. It addresses an issue that comes up in the theory of "homotopy operations".[20]
Hilton returned to Manchester as Professor, in 1956.[28] In 1958, he became the Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at the
University of Birmingham.[7] He moved to the United States in 1962 to be Professor of Mathematics at
Cornell University, a post he held until 1971.[1] 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. On 1 September 1972, he was appointed Louis D. Beaumont University Professor at
Case Western Reserve University; on 1 September 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 is featured in the book Mathematical People.[29]
Death and family
Peter Hilton died on 6 November 2010 in
Binghamton,
New York, at age 87. He left behind his wife, Margaret Mostyn (born 1925), whom he married in 1949, and their two sons, who were adopted.[30] Margaret, a schoolteacher, had an acting career as Margaret Hilton in the US, in
summer stock theatre.[4] She also played television roles.[31] She died in Seattle in 2020.[32]
In August 1983, an international conference on algebraic topology was held, under the auspices of the Canadian Mathematical Society, to mark Hilton's 60th Birthday. Professor Hilton was presented with a Festschrift of papers dedicated to him (
London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, Volume 86, 1983). The
American Mathematical Society has published the proceedings under the title ‘Conference on Algebraic Topology in Honor of Peter Hilton’[33]
Hilton was selected in October 1992, to deliver the invited lecture at the ‘Georges de Rham’ day at the
University of Lausanne.
An International Conference was held in Montreal in May 1993, to mark the 70th birthday of Hilton. The proceedings were published as The Hilton Symposium, CRM Proceedings and Lecture Notes, Volume 6, American Mathematical Society (1994), edited by
Guido Mislin.
In 1994, Hilton was the Mahler Lecturer of the Australian Mathematical Society.
In the summers of 2001 and 2002, Hilton was Visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.[34]
In winter term of 2005 Hilton received an appointment as Courtesy Faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at University of South Florida.
Peter Hilton, Homotopy theory and duality, Gordon and Breach, New York-London-Paris, 1965
ISBN0-677-00295-5MR0198466
H.B. Griffiths and P.J. Hilton, "A Comprehensive Textbook of Classical Mathematics", Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1970,
ISBN978-0442028640
Peter J. Hilton, Guido Mislin, Joe Roitberg, Localization of nilpotent groups and spaces, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam-Oxford, 1975.
ISBN0-444-10776-2MR0478146
Peter Hilton,
Jean Pedersen, Build your own polyhedra. Second edition, Dale Seymour Publications, Palo Alto, 1994.
ISBN0-201-49096-X
^
abc"About the speaker",
announcementArchived 22 February 2007 at the
Wayback Machine of a lecture given by Peter Hilton at Bletchley Park on 12 July 2006. Retrieved 18 January 2007.
^
abPeter Hilton, "Living with Fish: Breaking Tunny in the Newmanry and the Testery", p. 190 from pp. 189–203 in
Jack Copeland ed, Colossus: The Secrets of
Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers,
Oxford University Press, 2006.
^
abJerry Roberts, "Major Tester's Section", p. 250 of pp. 249–259 in Jack Copeland ed, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford University Press, 2006.
^Jack Good, "Enigma and Fish", p. 160 from pp. 149–166 in F. H. Hinsley and Alan Strip, editors, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, 1993.
^David Joyner and David Kahn, editors, "Edited Transcript of Interview with Peter Hilton for Secrets of War", in Cryptologia 30(3), July–September 2006, pp. 236–250.