Footnotes

ALAN TURING'S OWN COPY OF A MATHEMATICS BOOK BY HIS MENTOR AND LIFELONG SUPPORTER MAXWELL H.A. NEWMAN. Newman (1897–1984) was, with J.H.C. Whitehead, the foremost exponent of topology in the 1920s. In the 1930s he "wrote a seminal paper on periodic transformations in Abelian topological groups and an admirable book, "Elements of the Topology of Plane Sets of Points" (ODNB). Turing first met Newman whilst attending his Part III course on the Foundation of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1934. This proved hugely influential on Turing, Andrew Hodges noting that in his own paper 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem' (1937) it "was as though Newman's lectures had tapped some stream of enquiry which had been flowing all the time and which found in this question an opportunity to emerge..." (Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, 1983).

During the war Newman worked at Bletchley with Turing on Colossus (the world's first large-scale electronic computer), afterwards taking up the position of Professor of Pure Mathematics at Manchester. "As the first reader of [Turing's] Computable Numbers and the co-author of the Colossus, Newman appreciated the potential of computers as well as anyone" (Hodges, ibid), and as such was a driving force in establishing the Manchester computer programme. In 1952 Newman acted as a character witness at Turing's trial, during which he described him as a personal friend and "one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation" (quoted in A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma).

Provenance: R.O. Davies, Leicester, Jan. [19]55, ownership inscription on front free endpaper. In 1953 Davies (1927-2023) joined the mathematics department of Leicester University (eventually becoming Professor Emeritus of Pure Mathematics) where he met and befriended Robin Gandy, who was Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University from 1950-56. On Turing's death in June 1954 Gandy, one of Turing's great friends, was made his executor. In an interview given by Davies to the Leicester City Museums Service, East Midlands Oral History Archives (available online) Davies discusses his friendship with Gandy, a meeting with Turing, and recounts that Turing had once organised a treasure hunt for the department.