GreenBkk.com Tech | The Turing papers: Saved

The Turing papers: Saved

Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:22 UK time, Friday, 25 February 2011

He was one of the founding fathers of modern computing. He also played a crucial role in the work to break the German codes which were key to the outcome of the World War II. Yet, despite his stature amongst the technical community, I sense that the name Alan Turing is still not that widely known, particularly amongst today's school students.

So, it was wonderful to hear the news that a collection of rare papers relating to Turing's work as a scientist and code-breaker has been saved from disappearing overseas.

Following a donation from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the papers will now be kept at Bletchley Park, the wartime code-breaking station which is now also a museum. I spoke yesterday to Simon Greenish, who runs the Bletchley Park Trust, and he was naturally overjoyed.

Very little in the way of documentary evidence survives from Bletchley Park's wartime history - its work was, after all, so secret that many of those who worked there did not tell close relatives what they had been doing for years afterwards, and most of the paperwork was destroyed.

"Now we are going to have a tangible link to Turing," Simon Greenish explained.

The papers include offprints of Turing's scientific articles. Among them is "On Computable Numbers", seen as one of the key documents in the history of computing. They were given to Max Newman, a colleague at Bletchley Park whose work on mechanising the code-breaking process makes him another important figure in the history of computing.

Today's news is also a great triumph for the people who've used modern methods - social media in particular - to campaign to preserve the heritage of Bletchley Park.

It was Gareth Halfacree who started a petition to save the Turing papers when he heard they were being put up for auction last year.

And for the last couple of years, the computer scientist Dr Sue Black, has worked tirelessly to get her colleagues in academia, the technology community, and the wider world to see the importance of what Bletchley Park and Turing did for Britain.

Thanks to them, maybe the name Alan Turing will now become rather better known to later generations of schoolchildren.

Credit: BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)