Alan Turing: The Enigma (124 page)

Authors: Andrew Hodges

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Science & Technology, #Computers, #History, #Mathematics, #History & Philosophy

BOOK: Alan Turing: The Enigma

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(
8.23
) Held in
KCC.

(
8.24
) Much material on the draughts and love-letter programs are held in the Christopher Strachey archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford. But the quoted love-letter is one that the public knew about: according to S. Lavington, A
History of Manchester Computers
(National Computer Centre, Manchester, 1975) it appeared in the 1955 edition of
Pears Cyclopaedia.

(
8.25
)
Faster than Thought
, ed. B. V. Bowden (Pitman, 1953). The glossary entry, even if hard on AMT in a tongue-in-cheek way, was in fact typical of the felicitous editing and commentary by Vivian Bowden, relieving the otherwise mundanely technical descriptions. It also reprinted the whole of Lady Lovelace’s memoir on the Analytic Engine.

(
8.26
) Translated from French and published as J. Piaget,
Logic and Psychology
(Manchester University Press, 1953).

(
8.27
) Photocopies of this and the
subsequent letters from AMT to Robin Gandy are in
KCC.

(
8.28
) C.G. Jung, ‘Approaching the Unconscious’, in the collection edited by him,
Man and his Symbols
(Aldus Books with W.H. Allen, 1964).

(
8.29
) This was a Symposium on Automatic Digital Computation, held at the NPL from 25 to 28 March 1953. AMT gave no talk. Notes made by Mike Woodger show that he commented on applications of computers to pure mathematics after a talk by J.C.P. Miller of Cambridge – mainly on the zeta function but also mentioning problems in algebraic topology.

(
8.30
)
The Shirburnian,
1953.

(
8.31
) The attribution to 1953 may here be wrong. This fragment of a letter in
KCC
was headed only ‘May’; it might have been May 1954. It was a note of apology for not visiting the Newmans (who retained their house in a village outside Cambridge) when on a visit to Cambridge two weeks or so earlier. ‘I found such a round of gaieties had been arranged for me that it was quite impossible to get out to see you.’ Nothing else of this correspondence has survived; my suspicion is that it probably held the most revealing and sophisticated psychological comment that he ever put into letters. But also, of course, an area where AMT’s life could not be separated from the privacy of others. Mrs Newman died in 1973.

(
8.32
) Letter to the author from Professor J. Polanyi, 6.10.78.

(
8.33
) Minutes of the University Council show that this had been decided by January or February 1953.

(
8.34
) As note 8.21.

(
8.35
) Fritz Peters,
Finistère
(Gollancz, 1951).

(
8.36
) Rodney Garland,
The Heart in Exile
(W.H. Allen, 1953).

(
8.37
) Depositions and post-mortem report are in
KCC.
The coroner’s remarks were reported in the local newspaper on 18 June 1954, in the
Daily Telegraph
on 11 June.

(
8.38
) Mrs Turing left the golden teaspoon in
KCC.

(
8.39
) The last, at least, in the series in
KCC.

(
8.40
) Letter in
KCC.

(
8.41
) Unpublished work in
KCC.
The second paper, as drafted, fell into three parts: I. Geometrical and descriptive phyllotaxis. II. Chemical theory of morphogenesis. III. A solution of morphogenetical equations for the case of spherical symmetry. This last part was the work of Bernard Richards. The passage quoted, the ‘Outline of Development of the Daisy’, did not fall within any of these; it was in a mass of less coherent ancillary material which worked out in more detail some specific examples of the ‘chemical theory’.

(
8.42
) P.S. Novikov,
Doklady Akad. Nauk. SSSR (N.S.) 85
(1952).

(
8.43
) A few pages of this work survive in
KCC
; not enough to see where it might have led. He seems to have been interested in reformulating the connection between spinors and vectors, ideas probably inspired by Dirac.

(
8.44
) P.A.M. Dirac,
Nature 139
, 323 (1937).

(
8.45
) Robin Gandy wrote to Newman very shortly after the death, and described these ideas. The letter is in
KCC.
The problem to do with quantum-mechanical ‘observation’, that ‘a watched pot never boils’, is still a live
question. I owe Philip Pearle for a recent reference: Ahanarov
et al., Phys. Rev. D 21,
2235 (1980).

(
8.46
) One negative point deserves mention: rumours floated about after AMT’s death that a second charge had been brought, but these had absolutely no foundation. One other curiosity reflects ambiguously upon his relationship with the state at the end of 1952, which was rather before the real crackdown began. On 28 November 1952 AMT wrote to Sir John Stopford, the Vice-Chancellor, saying that he had been ‘invited by the Foreign Office to give a number of lectures at five German universities’ in the spring, and that he would ‘very much like to go’ for the two weeks required. Perhaps this was a form of compensation for the loss of his consultancy work – but it is surprising that he should actually have been encouraged into the treacherous fields of post-war Germany. In the event he did
not go
after all. Permission was, of course, granted by the university, but on 22 January AMT wrote: ‘I have however now cancelled my tour, as I found myself unable to undertake the work that would be involved.’ Was this the real reason? There is obviously much more as yet unknown, and it can only be noted that British official silence regarding ‘security’ is total.

(
8.47
)
Interim Report submitted to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by its Subcommittee on Investigations pursuant to S. Res. 280 (81st Congress).
Reprinted in D.W. Cory,
The Homosexual in America,
(Greenberg, New York, 1951).

(
8.48
) Alan Moorehead,
The Traitors
(Hamish Hamilton, 1952).

(
8.49
) In contrast, British policy only emerged ten years later, on account of a case where in late 1953 the vetters had
not
made a very searching investigation, and where a press campaign forced the government to admit that it had employed a homosexual in the diplomatic service. The quotations are from the
Report of the Tribunal appointed to Inquire into the Vassall Case and Related Matters,
1963. There is a very interesting contemporary account in fictional form of these issues in Rodney Garland,
The Troubled Midnight
(W.H. Allen, 1954).

(
8.50
) Here and elsewhere in this passage I draw on Peter Wildeblood,
Against the Law
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955).

(
8.51
)
Hansard,
Parliamentary Debates (Commons)
521,
pages 526 and 1297.

(
8.52
)
Hansard,
Parliamentary Debates (Lords),
187
, pages 737-767.

(
8.53
) Published in the
Journal of Mental Science,
April 1954.

(
8.54
) K. Sand and H. Okkels, in
Endokrinologie 19
(1938).

(
8.55
)
Hansard
, Parliamentary Debates (Commons)
526,
page 1866

(8.56) Quoting this report from Peter Wildeblood’s book.

(
8.57
) R.S. Cline,
Secrets Spies and Scholars
(Acropolis Books, Washington DC, 1976). Cline wrote as a retired deputy director of the CIA.

(
8.58
) This was certainly just the kind of thing that the CIA was supposed to know about, but apparently it did not. According to a letter of 29.11.79 to the author, the CIA has no records concerning AMT.

(
8.59
) As note 8.39.

(
8.60
) As note 8.49.

(
8.61
) In
What I Believe
, 1938, reprinted in the anthology
Two Cheers for Democracy
, as note BP 13.

(
8.62
) As note 8.28.

(
8.63
) An appreciation written by Robin
Gandy and submitted to
The Times
to follow the more formal obituary by Max Newman, but not published. It is in
KCC.

(
8.64
) Her introduction to
EST.

(
8.65
) As note 8.61.

(
8.66
) See note 7.60

(
8.67
) The letter itself did not survive, although the fact that AMT did write to James Atkins in early 1937 is established by AMT’s reference in a letter home to his having sent an offprint of
Computable Numbers
to his friend. I have drawn on James Atkins’ recollection of the ‘apple’ and ‘electrical wiring’ mentioned in the letter, a recollection as clear and distinct and unsolicited as any that have come my way. The sceptical reader may wonder whether this was not a projection of the news of 1954 into a memory of 1937. Here again it is as clear as anything I have been told that James Atkins never knew that an apple had actually featured in AMT’s death, until he heard of it from me. It had not been mentioned in the
Daily Telegraph
, where he had read the report in 1954, and he had no knowledge that Mrs Turing or anyone else had written about it.

(
8.68
) As note 2.18.

(
8.69
) In
The Challenge of our Time
, a 1946 radio broadcast, published in
Two Cheers for Democracy
, as note BP 13. A rather more polemical critique of Forster was given by the author and David Hutter in
With Downcast Gays
(Pomegranate Press, London, 1974; Pink Triangle Press, Toronto, 1977).

Acknowledgements

The reproduction of Alan Turing’s letters and papers has been made possible by the kind permission of the Fellows and Scholars of King’s College,
Cambridge, the A.M. Turing Trust, Robin Gandy, and P.N. Furbank. I am grateful to Donald Michie, Chairman of the A.M. Turing Trust, and to Peter Croft, Librarian of King’s College, Cambridge, for facilitating the granting of this permission. I am grateful also to the Headmaster of Sherborne School for permission to reproduce those records held at Sherborne.

Transcripts of Crown Copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. So do the extracts from
British Intelligence in the Second World War
. I am grateful also for specific permission to reproduce photographs of the Colossus and the Delilah.

Private letters and papers are reproduced by permission of the many individuals who have kindly made them available.

I am grateful to the London Mathematical Society, and to Harvester Press, for permission to reproduce long extracts. The authors and publishers of other quotations are acknowledged in the Notes above.

Index