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2 A Note on Motivation
It is perhaps worth saying explicitly that my purpose is not to argue that historians of
computing should, in their accounts of the period, replace heroic engineering pioneers
with heroic mathematicians. The principal problem with the conventional account is
not that it allocates credit inappropriately but that in so doing it helps obscure much
more interesting historical questions concerning the role played by the government in
fostering and directing technological innovation and development in Britain both
during the second world war and in the immediate post-war period.1 The historical re-
evaluation of the development of the Manchester Baby which I present should not be
understood as an end in itself nor, primarily, as a contribution to a credit dispute but
rather as a necessary clearing of the ground so that historians of technology can en-
gage with topics of greater historical significance.
3 M.H.A. Newman
Despite having received very little attention from historians of computing, it is no
exaggeration to say that Max Newman was one of the most significant figures in the
early history of British computing. His direct influence was exerted over more than a
decade beginning at Cambridge before the Second World War, continuing at
Bletchley Park during hostilities, and finishing in the peace-time setting of Manches-
ter in the mid-late 1940s.
Newman's deeply-ingrained habit of understating his own contribution and prefer-
ence for stressing the accomplishments of others goes some way towards explaining
why historians of computing have generally paid only superficial attention to this
remarkable man who is, in consequence, principally remembered today for his work
as a mathematician and topologist.
4 Turing and the Roots of Modern Computing
Modern computing is often said to have originated with A.M. (Alan) Turing. If so
then its roots can be traced back through Newman to a talk given by David Hilbert at
the Sorbonne on the morning of the 8th August 1900 in which he proposed twenty-
three “future problems” for mathematics research in the 20th century. The tenth of
Hilbert's questions led directly to Hilbert and Ackerman's 1928 formulation of the
Entscheidungsproblem [1], which Hilbert considered to be “the central problem of
mathematical logic” [2]. The essence of the question was: could there exist, at least in
principle, a definite method or process involving a finite number of steps, by which
the validity of any given first-order logic statement might be decided?
Turing seems first to have encountered the Entscheidungsproblem around the
Spring of 1935 when he was a student on Newman's Part III course on the founda-
tions of mathematics [3]. Solving the Entscheidungsproblem rigorously was entirely
dependent on the extent to which a formalisation of the notion of “process” could be
devised and it was this task which Turing, acting on a suggestion of Newman's,
accomplished so dramatically:
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