Tutte

Tutte is the feminine plural form of the Italian adjective tutto, meaning "all" or "the whole." It is used to modify feminine plural nouns, for example tutte le persone (all the people) or tutte le note (all the notes). In Italian, adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify: tutti is masculine plural, tutte is feminine plural.

In music, the term tutti is standard to indicate all performers or all sections. The form tutte can appear in Italian text or program notes when referring to feminine nouns, such as tutte le voci (all the voices). The more common musical direction is tutti, but tutte may appear in written language accompanying feminine phrases.

Tutte is also a surname. The best-known bearer is William Thomas Tutte (1917–2002), a Canadian-British mathematician and cryptanalyst who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II and later made foundational contributions to graph theory. Several concepts in graph theory bear his name: the Tutte polynomial, a two-variable graph invariant that generalizes various counting polynomials; and the Tutte graph, a 3-regular, 3-connected bipartite graph with 46 vertices that provided a famous counterexample to a proposed conjecture about Hamiltonian cycles. Tutte’s work spans combinatorics, coding theory, and cryptography, and his name is closely associated with modern graph theory.