There was lots of information in the book-among other things, about Turing’s largely unpublished work on biology. But looking through the card catalog at the Caltech library one day, I chanced upon a book called Alan M. Of course, Alan Turing wasn’t famous yet (although, as it happens, I’d already heard of him from someone who’d known him at Bletchley Park during the Second World War).Īlan Turing still wasn’t famous in 1981 when I started studying simple programs, albeit in the context of cellular automata rather than Turing machines. But he never mentioned Alan Turing to me.

And he often told stories about people in Cambridge. He’d also been responsible for the school getting a computer (programmed with paper tape, and the size of a desk)-that was the very first computer I ever used.Īt the time, I didn’t know too much about Norman’s background (remember, this was long before the web). He was charmingly over the top in many ways, and told endless stories about math and other things. He was a math teacher, nicknamed “Nutty Norman”. I had known Norman Routledge when I was a high-school student at Eton in the early 1970s. But what it did have (in addition to an inscription saying “from Alan Turing’s books”) was a colorful four-page note from Norman Routledge to George Rutter, written in 2002. I opened the front of the book, wondering if it might have a “Property of Alan Turing” sticker or something.

George reached into his briefcase and pulled out a rather unassuming, typical mid-1900s academic volume. We ate and chatted, and waited for the food to be cleared. But in March 2019 I was indeed in England, and arranged to meet George for breakfast at a small hotel in Oxford. George ended, “If you would like the book, I could give it to you the next time you are in England.”Ī couple of years passed.

In May 2017, I got an email from a former high-school teacher of mine named George Rutter: “I have a copy of Dirac’s big book in German ( Die Prinzipien der Quantenmechanik) that was owned by Alan Turing, and following your book Idea Makers it seemed obvious that you were the right person to own this.” He explained that he’d got the book from another (by then deceased) former high-school teacher of mine, Norman Routledge, who I knew had been a friend of Alan Turing’s.

Alan turing book