Rare Alan Turing Journal Shows His Genius at Work

by Donna Tam,   CNet 

  Two decades after its discovery, a rare handwritten journal belonging to computing pioneer Alan Turing will be auctioned off this spring in San Francisco. The journal will be put up for auction by Bonhams in April and is expected to fetch “at least seven figures,” a portion of which will be donated to charity.

Turing’s influence permeates the computer industry. He was the first to devise the notion of step-by-step instructions, or algorithms, for performing calculations. His so-called Turing machine concept became the basis of the digital computer. Now the public is getting a glimpse of his mathematical brilliance at work.

Cassandra Hatton, a specialist in fine books, manuscripts, and space history with Bonhams, believes Turing wrote the 56-page journal between 1940 and 1942, a period when he was working for the British government to help crack Nazi codes.

Hatton has handled the first editions of Galileo’s “Dialogo” and Newton’s “Principia” as well as manuscripts written by Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. Yet she counts Turing’s journal, surfacing publicly for the first time since his death 61 years ago, as one of the top scientific documents she’s held. That’s because it’s the most extensive example of Turing’s handwritten notations — covering 56 pages — ever seen. Bonhams, which will put the document up for auction in April, expects it to fetch “at least seven figures,” a portion of which will go to charity.

Hatton says the journal shows Turing trying to find and correct mistakes in mathematical notation. “He’s looking at how his predecessors are looking at mathematical notations…he’s trying to see where they went wrong so he can make it right.” The journal contains Turing’s musings on mathematical theory and notation, as well as a dream journal written by Robin Gandy, a colleague of Turing’s who was entrusted with his papers after Turing’s death in 1954. The journal was locked away by Gandy and only discovered after his death in 1995. Hatton believes the journal is likely the only such handwritten manuscript Turing left behind, as he preferred to use a typewriter.

DCL: There is an old saying in football, “you’re never as good, or as bad, as they say you are”. Turing gets more credit for “inventing computing machines” than is appropriate. Johnny von Neumann among others, was doing very similar work at the same time in the USA, and was in fact ahead of Turing. They collaborated on an early computer built at the NPL around 1946. Gandy was my  boss when I took my first teaching job at the University of Manchester in 1965.  Gandy himself  was a very odd fish. He might well have hidden Turing’s journal away because of  homosexual content.  Here’s a link to the CNet article.