Alan Turing (1912-54) is known for many things, but his love of America is not one of them. This despite the fact that he spent considerable amounts of time in the U.S. in the 1930s, and again in 1942-43. Turing first came to Princeton in 1936 to conduct Ph.D. studies. As an undergraduate at Cambridge he had worked on Hilbert’s Entscheidungs (“decision problem”) problem, showing as early as 1935 that there can not exist an algorithm that can determine whether an inference in a formal logic system is valid. His mentor Max Newman (1897-1984) encouraged the young Turing (23 at the time) to publish. Before he managed to do so however, Princeton mathematician Alonzo Church (1903-95) established the same result using a different method.

Newman, realizing that Princeton had much more to offer Turing than did Cambridge, wrote Church seeking support for him to travel across the Atlantic for his Ph.D. studies. He got Church’s support and set off to America in the summer of 1936. Turing hoped to see his idol Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) while in Princeton, but never managed to actually meet him—as Gödel in the 30s was struggling mentally, travelling back and fourth between Vienna and Princeton every other year or so.

Read more about Alan Turing in the following previous issues of Privatdozent:

• Alan Turing in America, May 14th 2021

• Turing Uncomputability, August 13th 2021

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Alan Turing in America

“Beyond the way they speak, there is only one (no two!) features of American life which I find really tiresome. The impossibility of getting a bath in the ordinary sense and their ideas on room temperature” — Alan Turing (1936) Pioneering British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing first arrived in America on the 28th of September 1936. Born in 1912, Turing was twenty-four years old when he was invited attend graduate school at Princeton University, studying under Alonzo Church. A Master’s student of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, Turing was at the time working on the theory of computability and would in the coming months be publishing his now renowned paper …

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2 years ago · 2 likes · Jørgen Veisdal

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