Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923[1] – 6 November 2010[2]) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II.

[3] He was born in Brondesbury, London, the son of Mortimer Jacob Hilton (1893–1959),[4] a Jewish physician who was in general practice in Peckham, and his wife Elizabeth Amelia Freedman (1900–1984),[4] and was brought up in Kilburn.

[5] 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.

Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues.

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).

[11] 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.

A convivial pub drinker at Bletchley Park, Hilton also spent time with Turing working on chess problems and palindromes.

[24] In 1952, Hilton moved to DPMMS in Cambridge, England, where he ran a topology seminar attended by John Frank Adams, Michael Atiyah, David B.

[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.

[33] Hilton is portrayed by actor Matthew Beard in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which tells the tale of Alan Turing and the cracking of Nazi Germany's Enigma code.

According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project site, Hilton supervised at least 27 doctoral students, including Paul Kainen at Cornell University.