Here are a few links to background material on the Tutte polynomial.
- Wikipedia’s page on the Tutte polynomial
- MathWorld’s page on the Tutte polynomial
- Chapter X of Bollobás’ Modern Graph Theory, springer, 1998, contains an excellent introduction to the Tutte polynomial.
- Welsh’s Complexity: Knots, Colourings and Countings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, is another excellent book on the topic.
- Brylawski, The Tutte polynomial. I. General theory, in Matroid theory and its applications, Liguori, 1982.
- Brylawski & Oxley, The Tutte polynomial and its applications, in Matroid applications, Encyclopedia Math. Appl., 40, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992.
- Ellis-Monaghan & Merino, Graph polynomials and their applications I: The Tutte polynomial; and Graph polynomials and their applications II: Interrelations and interpretations, in Structural analysis of complex networks, Birkhäuser, 2011.
Motivated by the film Imitation Game, here are a few links of Bill Tutte’s wartime work at Bletchley Park (with thanks to Henry Crapo and Janos Makowskyfor sending some of the links):
- As introduction, this fine Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte
- a biography http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roybiogmem/58/283.full.pdf?ijkey=A3z6eiTCGLPjdZR&keytype=ref
- and a newspaper article http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4887150-waterloo-prof-honoured-posthumously-for-secret-wartime-work/
- His colleague Tony Sale’s article http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/fish.htm
- Bill Tutte’s lecture on FISH and I https://cryptocellar.web.cern.ch/cryptocellar/tutte.pdf
- An article on Tutte the code breaker: https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/spring-2015/features/keeping-secrets
- A documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwgDTBSl-d0
- A lecture on Tutte’s work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1bJHG95Xn8