Max Newman was a British mathematician and codebreaker who led the Bletchley Park section responsible for specifying the Colossus computer, used to break the German Lorenz cipher during the Second World War. After the war he established the Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, where his team built the Manchester Baby in 1948, one of the first electronic computers able to store and run a program in its own memory. Newman recruited Alan Turing to Manchester to work on the resulting computing program.
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What role did Max Newman play in Alan Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers?
His lectures inspired Turing, and he helped get the paper published quickly.
Newman's 1935 lectures on the foundations of mathematics and Gödel's theorem inspired Alan Turing to work on the decision problem. In spring 1936 Turing showed him a draft of On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Newman recognized the paper's importance and helped ensure swift publication, then arranged for Turing to visit Princeton, where Alonzo Church was working on the same problem.
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Max Newman
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman (7 February 1897 - 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker.
2. Wikidata: Max Newman
Wikidata Q707155, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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