A SET of scientific papers by mathematical genius Alan Turing which were found in a loft are expected to fetch thousands of pounds at auction in Lichfield.
The documents are being sold by city business Rare Book Auctions on 17th June.
The archive had originally been gifted by the Bletchley Park codebreaker’s mother to his friend Norman Routledge.
Known as offprints, they were produced in very small numbers and distributed within academia.
The collection includes Turing’s signed personal copy of his PhD dissertation from 1938-39, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals. The document is expected to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000, as is On Computable Numbers 1936-37, which introduced the world to the idea of a “universal computing machine”.
Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, described the collection as “the most important archive I’ve ever handled”.
He said:
“These seemingly plain papers – perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers – represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing.
“Literature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman. For me, it’s like studying the language of another planet.
“At the same time, I keep thinking of the tragic end to Turing’s life – charged as a criminal, barred from GCHQ, banned from the United States and forced to undergo ‘chemical castration’. All this despite the invaluable work he’d done at Bletchley Park during the war and for nothing more than his sexuality.
“This injustice and the fact he didn’t survive to see his enormous influence and impact makes these papers feel so special.
“It’s at least comforting to know that he lives on through his work. He survives through his legacy.”
The collection also includes The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.
Dating from 1952, it is Turing’s lesser-known work on mathematical biology and his last major published work.
Jim said:
“As recently as 2023, a study confirmed Turing’s mathematical model hypothesis as outlined in The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. In this way the papers are still alive. They’re still relevant and groundbreaking.
“We even have Turing’s first published paper from 1935, Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity, which is simply a single sheet of paper.
“And the provenance couldn’t be better. The archive was gifted to Turing’s friend and fellow mathematician Norman Arthur Routledge by Turing’s mother Ethel – and we have her handwritten letter explaining this.
“Anything with a direct connection to Turing is highly desirable and almost impossible to find. Hardly anything like this appears on the open market, so predicting hammer prices is fortune-telling.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire this material. I suspect interest will be strong in Silicon Valley – where Turing’s influence shines brightly – but it would be lovely to see material acquired by institutions who could share things with the public.”
