Campaign to buy Alan Turing's notebook for the nation
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Version 0 of 1. Alan Turing’s Lost Notebook, with his handwritten mathematical thoughts from 1942, has mysteriously reappeared in New York City auction house, Bonhams, with a predicted selling price of at least one million dollars. What makes it extra special is that we have so little left from this British mathematical magician of the computer age, apart from his ideas. Hidden within the middle pages that Turing left blank are secret personal notes of his student and close friend, Robin Gandy. Robin was a motorbike riding and famously good looking professor of logic at Manchester University at the time I was completing my thesis there in 1969. He had been staying with Turing some eight days before he so tragically died in Wilmslow on June 7, 1954 — the house, in Adlington Road, recently sold for close on a million pounds. Gandy insisted they were never lovers. His very personal comments on his relationship with the codebreaking hero of Bletchley Park, shamefully repaid for his wartime exploits — and so vividly evoked in the new Oscar-nominated movie The Imitation Game — are indispensible. After Turing’s untimely death just before his 42nd birthday - cyanide poisoning, seemingly suicide — his papers came to Gandy, with the notebook kept close until his own demise in Oxford in 1995. It is a mystery what happened to it then. It seems a number of items were selected for the Turing archive at Turing’s old college King’s, at Cambridge University, in 1996. But they were never offered the notebook. Few had even heard of him back then. Turing and his work was largely lost to awareness outside the academic world for 30 years after the war. The war won, the amazing computing machines and Bletchley Park decoders were promptly discarded by Churchill’s government; and their story ruthlessly wrapped in the Official Secrets Act until the controversial publication of a book loosened its grip in the mid-1970s. It was only in the 1990s that Bletchley Park was saved from the bulldozers and “death by housing estate”. Now, post-2012 centenary of Turing’s birth, Turing graduates to the Benedict Cumberbatch-played hero of award-winning movie The Imitation Game. And with Turing approaching a household name, there is intense interest in who this amazing “Father of the Information Age” actually was. The film echoes computing professor Brian Randell’s description: “Turing, clearly, was viewed with considerable awe by most of his colleagues at Bletchley because of his evident intellect and great originality and importance of his contributions, and by many with considerable discomfort because his personality was so outlandish. Many people found him incomprehensible, perhaps being intimidated by his reputation but more likely being put off by his character and mannerisms.” Randell is specially known for successfully battling the Government to get the groundbreaking Colossus computing machine that was built at Bletchley declassified in 1976, to the amazement of computer experts around the world. They did not know the UK had done that. Turing’s nieces have a fond memory of their Uncle Alan. His eldest niece, Inagh, 18 when he died, is quoted in a BBC interview: “I think definitely that he should be given all the recognition for what he did during the war. It’s so sad that he was persecuted and hounded at the end of his life. I’m sure it must have absolutely ruined his life. It was absolutely miserable. They injected him with hormones and goodness knows what.” So what will happen to this rare historical reminder of the genius and individuality of one of the world’s greatest ever scientists? The importance of Alan Turing to the UK cannot be overestimated. He and his mathematics were key to Bletchley Park saving of millions of lives in WW2. His invention of the Universal Turing machine played midwife to the birth of the modern computer. He discovered incomputability, proving that computers could not solve everything. He has dominated our thinking on intelligent machines and the human brain for over 60 years now. His mathematics of patterns in nature feeds into our wider understanding of our hugely complex universe. This unique document — “the only extensive autograph manuscript by Turing in existence” as it is described by Bonhams — should be proudly on display, in, say, the Science Museum in London, where Turing’s mathematical achievements will be properly honoured at last. This week I have launched a UK petition asking that the Government step in to “Retain Alan Turing’s Notebook for the Nation”. Due to the coming election, the petition closes at the end of March, and the notebook is due to be auctioned in New York on April 13. Time is short. If you are a UK citizen, please sign. Barry Cooper is professor of mathematics at the University of Leeds and co-editor with Jan van Leeuwen of the Elsevier book, Alan Turing — His Work and Impact. • This article was amended on 18 February 2015. An earlier version said King’s College, Cambridge had rejected Turing’s notebook. That has been corrected to say the college was never offered the notebook for its archive. |