I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Tutte give a talk in one of my undergraduate classes. It was Fall 2001 and I was a lowly undergrad at UW taking Math 249, the "advanced" requisite combinatorics course. I believe Dr. Tutte was a professor emeritus at the time and came to campus about once a week. Since our class was small, our prof asked us if we'd like to have Dr. Tutte give a talk. To be honest, I'd never heard about him before that, but the idea of having a math prof who helped fight Nazis come in was kind of awesome.

I still remember that talk to this day. The actual content of the talk was very interesting (he talked about his work at Bletchley Park, coming to Canada, his research at UW), but what has stuck most in my mind all these years was what I can only call his aura. Even at 80+ years old, he was a captivating speaker and all ~ 20 of us kids in that class were slack-jawed, hanging off our seat, listening to every word, in awe of him and what he did, especially since he wasn't that much older than any of us were when he did it.

I later did work with mesh parameterization and was delighted to find out that his work was considered seminal (the planar embedding theorem and the so called "Tutte weights"). He made a lot of contributions and published a lot of material, so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that my area of research intersected with his. It was a nice feeling to be able to reference him though.

To his memory.