Prof

by Dermot Turing

  Alec Pryce was getting rather exhausted with his Christmas shopping. His method was slightly unconventional. He would walk round the shops in London or Manchester until he saw something which took his fancy, and think of some one of his friends and whether ^1 who would be pleased by it. It was a sort of allegory of his method of work (though he didn’t know it) which depended on waiting for inspiration.

  When applied to Christmas shopping this method led to ^ variety of emotion just as much as when applied to work. Long periods of semi-despair wandering the stores, and every half hour or so, but quite erratically, something would leap out from the miserable background. […]

  Alec had been working rather hard until two or three weeks before. It was about interplanetary travel. Alec had always been rather keen on such crackpot problems, but although he rather liked to let himself go rather wildly to newspaper men or on the Third programme when he got the chance, when he wrote for technically brained readers his work was quite sound, or had been when he was younger. This last paper was real good stuff: better than he’d done since his mid twenties when he had introduced the idea which is now commonly known as ‘Pryce’s buoy’. Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used. The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec could pretend that the word was spelt without the ‘u’. It was quite some time now since he had ‘had’ anyone, in fact not since he had met that soldier in Paris last summer. Now that his paper was finished he might justifiably consider that he had earned another young man, and he knew where he might find one who might be suitable.

  - - -

  Ron Miller was distinctly bored. He had been out of any job for two months, and he’d got no cash. He ought to have had 10/- or so for that little job he had helped Ernie over. All he had had to do was to hold the night watchman in conversation for a few minutes whilst the others got on with it. But still it wasn’t really safe. Being questioned by the police was very uncomfortable.

  Yielding to treatment

  There was some self-analysis going on. In November 1952 Alan wrote to Robin Gandy that he had ‘decided to have another, and rather more co-operative go at a psychiatrist. If he can put me into a more resigned frame of mind it would be something.’ Without telling Mother, but at the prompting of Lyn Newman, Alan began consulting Dr Franz Greenbaum. Dr Greenbaum was a refugee from Nazi Germany who had settled in Manchester in 1939. He was trained in the Jungian tradition, which meant that perpetrating Lytton Strachey’s ‘ludicrous fraud’ was not part of the plan. Dr Greenbaum would take Alan’s sexuality as he found it. Alan himself may not have seen the purpose of the consultations in quite the same light as his doctor. In December he reported to Nick Furbank that he had had a dream ‘indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don’t accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams’. However, a resigned frame of mind was Dr Greenbaum’s objective, and in any case, the discussions helped.

  Dr Greenbaum.

  Looking Glass Message. Alan sent Robin Gandy letters printed on the Manchester computer, programmed to act as a typewriter.

  Alan was corresponding frequently with Robin Gandy, sometimes using the rather unorthodox medium of computer print-out. The Manchester computer was not provided with handy word-processing software, so each character to be printed had to be programmed into the machine. Programming the machine just to print out a note for Robin was, in some sense, a labour of love.

  /////////////TO/R/O/GANDY/TWENTY/NINE/CHESTRRFIELD/ STREET/LEICESTER////////////DEAR/ROBIN/////////////////THEY/ HAVE/AT/LAST/FOUND/SOMEONE/TO/REFEREE/YOUR/

  THESEIS/ VIZ/BRAITHWAITE////// […]

  Love

  Alan.

  Fortunately for Robin, Richard Braithwaite from King’s (who had not only helped see Alan elected to a fellowship years before, but also moderated the Third Programme debate with Sir Geoffrey Jefferson) had stepped up to be his examiner. That, though, was not the principal thing on Alan’s mind early in 1953:

  /CC///////DEAR/ROBIN//////////////SORRY///IT/REALLY/INSNT/

  QPOSSIBLE/TO/MAKE/YOUR/ORAL/ANY/EARLIER////

  BRAITHWAITE/WON"T/HEVE/READ/IT/BEFORE/THE/

  VERY/END/OF/MARCH////[…]/////////YOUR/LAST/LETTER/ARRIVED/INTHE/

  MIDDLE/OF/A/CRISIS/ABOUT/"DEN//NORSKE/GUTT"//

  SO/I/HAVE/NOT/BEEN/ABLE/TO/GIVE/MY/ATTENTION/

  YET/TO/THE/REALLY/VITAL/PART/ABOUT/THEORY/OF/

  PERCEPTION/But will do so atonce//////// […] ///I/

  WAS/RATHER/GLAD/YOU/DIDN"T/GIVE/ME/ANY/

  DETAIL/OFG"S/ACCOUNT/OF/THE/INTERVIEW/////I/ SUPPOSE/IT/WAS/

  THE/ONE/A/FEW/WEEKS/AGO/YOU/MEANT Will be able to stand it later ////EVER///////////////////////////////////

  Alan

  The Kjell routine. Alan Turing named his phyllotaxis programs for the Manchester computer for Kjell Carlson. This page from his manuscript notes sets out the theory.

  There was indeed a crisis. ‘Den norske Gutt’ (the young Norwegian man) was Kjell Carlson, whom Alan had met on a holiday to Norway late in 1952. The holiday had been taken with a view to meetings which were illegal in England, and it seemed that the holiday had been a success. In 1953 Alan was naming his computer routines after Kjell and other things Norwegian (Ibsen, NorMast, NorPrint, MiddleKjell and so on). Alan explained the crisis in a letter to Norman Routledge:

  My dear Norman,

  Thanks for your letter. I should have answered it earlier.

  I have a delightful story to tell you of my adventurous life when we meet. I’ve had another round with the gendarmes, and its positively round II to Turing. Half the police of N. England (by one report) were out searching for a supposed boy friend of mine. It was all a mare’s nest. Perfect virtue and chastity had governed all our proceedings. But the poor sweeties never knew this. A very light kiss beneath a foreign flag, under the influence of drink, was all that had ever occurred. Everything is now cosy again, except that the innocent boy has had rather a raw deal I think. I’ll tell you all when we meet in March in Teddington. Being on probation my shining virtue was terrific, and had to be. If I had so much as parked my bicycle on the wrong side of the road there might have been 12 years for me. Of course the police are going to be a bit more nosy, so virtue must continue to shine.

  I might try to get a job in France. But I’ve also been having psycho analysis for a few months now, and it seems to be working a bit. Its quite fun, and I think I’ve got a good man. 80% of the time we are working out the significance of my dreams. No time to write about logic now!

  Ever

  Alan

  Alan was acting. If Alan could put on a stiff upper lip for Donald Bayley, he could also camp it up for the flamboyant Norman Routledge. Nothing remains to explain the remark about ‘G’s account of the interview’ in Alan’s computer print-out message to Robin Gandy. Moreover, police being nosy before the expiry of the year on probation was not what Alan needed; it would ensure he remained on their watch-list after the 12 months was up. To Robin, in a letter dated 11 March 1953, he was less forced:

  The Kjell crisis has now evaporated. It was very active for about a week. It started by my getting a P.C. from him saying he was on his way to visit me. At one stage police over the N of England were out searching for him, especially in Wilmslow, Manchester, Newcastle etc. I will tell you all one day. He is now back in Bergen without my even seeing him! For sheer incident it almost rivals the Arnold story.

  I’ve got a shocking tendency at present to fritter my time away on anything but what I ought to be doing. I thought I’d found the reason for all this, but that hasn’t made things much better. One thing I’ve done is to rig the room next bathroom up as electrical lab. Am not doing very well over your vision model.

  Went down to Sherborne to lecture some boys on computers. Really quite a treat, in many ways. They were so luscious, and so well mannered, with a little dash of pertness, and Sherborne itself quite unsp
oilt.

  Love

  Alan

  Sherborne recorded its own thoughts on the occasion:

  THE ALCHEMISTS

  The Society met for the first time this term on Monday, March 9th [1953], at the Green when a paper on the Electronic Brain was read by Mr Turing. Several members of the audience had foreseen the possibility that they might not understand a word of what was said, but they could not have been more mistaken. Mr Turing made a very clear analogy between a stupid clerk, with his mechanical calculating device paper to write his workings on and his instructions, and the Electronic Brain which combined all these in one. All that was necessary was to put the instructions into a tape machine and the mass of wires, valves, resistors, condensers and chokes did the rest, the answer appearing on another tape. The Brain was, however liable to make mistakes and subtle checking devices were included to detect them. As yet it cannot do anything of its own accord, nor is it able to rectify its own mistakes. Slides were shown of the general layout of the machine and also of some previous ones made in the last century. The questions at the end of the meeting showed how much the Society had grasped the principles underlying the workings of the Electronic Brain.

  It seems that the final sentence can be read in more than one way. Not all the well-mannered boys may have been mistaken about their inability to understand the Electronic Brain.

  Perplication

  There was also an attempt to grasp the principles underlying the workings of the human brain. With the Kjell crisis over, Alan had settled into the sessions with Dr Greenbaum. By May 1953, Alan wrote to Lyn Newman saying, ‘Greenbaum has been making great strides in the last few weeks. We seem to be getting somewhere near the root of the trouble now’. He also told Lyn that ‘it was worth anything to have his life remade’. As was his way, Alan was making friends with the Greenbaum children too. In May 1953 Alan provided Maria Greenbaum, Dr Greenbaum’s six-year-old daughter, with some hints for the holidays on how to solve a solitaire puzzle. Fortunately for Maria, the instructions were not in back-to-front 32-character code; quite the contrary, they were written in a very clear way and with a specially invented notation so she could work out what to do.

  A set of Alan’s own notes on mathematical notation came up for auction in 2015, costing the buyer over a million US dollars. This is one paper of at least two which Alan wrote about reforming mathematical notation. Alan claimed it was difficult to understand the thinking behind traditional dy/dx usage for differential calculus, which might seem a bit rich from the Prof who used to write in Gothic German. Alan’s notebook was written up during the war, when he was working alongside Robin Gandy. It is interesting in part because Gandy himself wrote in it, when he inherited it after Alan’s death: ‘It seems a suitable disguise to write in between these notes of Alan’s on notation; but possibly a little sinister; a dead father figure, some of his thoughts which I most completely inherited.’ In 1955, like Alan before him, Robin had decided to write down his dreams; in Alan’s case, Dr Greenbaum had requested Alan to do so to assist with his analysis. Robin had also been trying to improve the conventions of notation himself:

  Dear Robin,

  Shall look forward to seeing you May 30. Have only been asked for reference by Cambridge so far. Can’t say I’m exactly surprised by the unsatisfactory response of your audience, re notation. I got just such a reception when I talked about deduction theorem at Bristol, about 3 or 4 years ago. It’s certainly rather discouraging.

  Treasure hunt date suits me fine.

  Yours

  Alan

  The treasure hunt referred to was not another attempt to dig up silver ingots imprudently buried during the war. These were practical games, with a hint of Lewis Carroll, as described by Sara Turing in her biography of Alan:

  Some of the clues were of Alan’s invention. Thus he prepared, for each competitor, a bottle containing red liquid, either malodorous (labelled ‘The Libation’) or drinkable (‘The Potion’): when the bottle was emptied the next clue was revealed – written in red ink on the back of the label. As another clue he made up the word ‘perplication’. Over his copy of Les Faux Amis ou les Trahisons du Vocabulaire Anglais1 he put a convincing dust cover inscribed with the title, ‘Dictionary of Uncommon French Words’. He then inserted the word ‘perplication’ with an explanation in French involving references to Maimonides and treasure hunters. This done, he prevailed on a bookseller to place it on one of his shelves.

  The clue in French may have been prompted by Alan’s recent reading matter, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, recommended by Nick Furbank, who was a participant in the treasure hunts. In a letter to Nick, written in confident French, in which he comments on the book, Alan tells him he is planning to make his will. Alan asks Nick to be his executor: ‘je voudrais bien qu’un ami sympathique se concerne de mes lettres et mes petites affaires, en cas d’aucun malheur.’

  Treasure hunt. Alan’s clue in an obscure French dictionary.

  In July 1953 Alan went to hospital to have his oestrogen implants removed. In another letter to Nick written at this time he says he wants a permanent relationship, mentioning the ‘problem of etiquette’ of ‘how to behave in a variety of different types of company, to which one doesn’t really belong oneself’. ‘Perplication’ was, according to Alan’s dictionary entry, French for doubt mixed with anxiety.

  As well as such ‘petites affaires’, there was greater business to attend to: a new hunt for the sources of shapes of secret living things. In the summer of 1953 Alan took on a new research student, Bernard Richards. Bernard was a 21-year-old mathematics graduate whose task was to solve Alan’s morphogenetic equations using the techniques of classical analysis. The problem to which the equations would be applied was a deep one, from the darkest, remotest places on earth.

  Notes

  1 For legal reasons the names of all defendants except Thacker, Murray and Turing have been fictionalised

  1 William’s elder brother

  1 Much of the draft is heavily crossed out and some words are difficult to read. The (editorial) symbol ^ denotes a word or passage which Alan deleted and which might affect the sense

  1 A gift from Mother from about 1932, later given to me by her when I was studying for ‘O’ level

  11

  UNSEEN WORLDS

  ON 7 DECEMBER 1872 a ship sailed from Sheerness. She had three masts and an auxiliary steam engine and displaced 2,300 tons. For a warship she was rather weakly armed, carrying only two guns. However, she carried six scientists, and her mission was not an aggressive one, unless you happened to live at the bottom of the sea. For her purpose was to explore the mysteries of the deep ocean and test some of the wilder notions of science, in particular a theory by one Darwin concerning the evolution of living things. She was HMS Challenger, and she was away from home for over three years, which was time enough to do an awful lot of dredging.

  Wonderful ooze

  The official report of the voyage of HMS Challenger runs to 50 volumes. Some volumes, such as XVIII, are in several parts, too big to bind in a single book. It sounds dry. It isn’t. The Preface to Volume XVIII begins:

  The significance of the Radiolaria in regard to the relations of life in the ocean has been increased in a most unexpected manner by the discoveries of the Challenger. Large swarms of these delicate Rhizopoda were found not only at the surface of the open ocean but also in its different bathymetrical zones. Thousands of new species make up the wonderful Radiolarian ooze, which covers large areas of the deep-sea bed, and was brought up from abysses of from 2000 to 4000 fathoms by the sounding machine of the Challenger. They open a new world to morphological investigation.

  HMS Challenger, whose 1870s voyage dredged up unicellular organisms ideal for comparison against Alan’s morphogenetic theory.

  Part 3 of Volume XVIII consists entirely of illustrations of the weird and fascinating creatures dredged up from the wonderful ooze. Some look so alien that they could only be from the fevered imagin
ation of a science-fiction writer; in fact it took the biologist Professor Ernst Haeckel ten years of peering down a microscope to catalogue, measure and draw them. They captured Alan Turing’s imagination, and opened a new world to morphological investigation. Bernard Richards picks up the story.

  To some it might seem an anomaly that two topics, namely high-speed electronic computers and tiny sea creatures, at opposite ends of the scientific spectrum, can be connected by computer science. The late Dr. Alan Turing proposed that the many shapes observed in minute sea creatures, the species ‘Radiolaria’, could be explained by postulating the diffusion of saline into a growing spherical body resulting in tentacles (‘spines’) growing out at equilibrium. The present author took this postulate of Turing’s and set out to prove, or otherwise, the validity of this theory by solving the differential diffusion equations and examining the resultant observable shapes.