Privatdozent Photo Edition #6
Alan Turing in a garden in Dene Road, Guildford (1928)
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 …
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