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TURING (ALAN) JAHNKE (EUGENE) AND FRITZ EMDE. Funktionentafeln Mit Formeln Und Kurven, ALAN TURING'S COPY, 1933
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Footnotes
Turing's copy of Tables of Functions, published in 1933 whilst he was an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. This edition included a chapter on "The Riemann Zeta-Function", about which Turing "developed a life-long fascination. Though his research in this area was not a major thrust of his career, he did make a number of pioneering contributions. Most have now been superseded by later work, but one technique that he introduced is still a standard tool in the computational analysis of the zeta and related functions. It is known as Turing's method, and keeps his name alive in those areas" (D.A. Hejhal and A.M. Odlyzko. 'Alan Turing and the Riemann Zeta Function', 2011). On his return from Princeton to Cambridge in 1938 Turing had "unusually for a mathematician... joined in Wittgenstein's classes, [and] unusually again he engineered a cogwheel machine to calculate the Riemann Zeta-function" (ODNB). A short bibliography of "Useful books for the computer" is included at the end of Tables of Functions, and as Donald Bayley's note [see below] confirms, the book accompanied Turing to Hanslope Park where, during the war years, he worked with Bayley on the 'Delilah' project (see lot 45).
Provenance: Alan Turing (1912-1954); Donald Bayley (1921-2020), manuscript note in his hand loosely inserted, "This belonged to the famous AM Turing of Enigma fame. I saw it with his books when I first met him in Hanslope [Park] in 1944. I was much taken with the diagrams of complex functions - which I hadn't seen before. After his death Robin Gandy said I was to have any keepsake I wished (I'm not sure whether this was a bequest in AMT's will - Gandy was executor). Anyway, I asked for this. It should be kept for posterity D.B.... In this broken spine condition he had used it a lot". Bayley was an electronic engineer who collaborated with Alan Turing on Delilah a functioning portable speech-encryption system, during the Second World War; thence by descent to the present owner.
Saleroom notices
Title pages and text are in both English and German.

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