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First edition, offprint issue, Alan Turing's copy, presented by his mother to his close friend and colleague Norman Routledge after her son's death. During his limited free time at Bletchley Park, Turing studied mathematical logic and corresponded on the topic with Max Newman, then still at Cambridge. The resulting co-authored paper extended and simplified Alonzo Church's work. When Turing's library was dispersed following his death, his mother Sara sent 13 different offprints of his articles to Routledge, including the present. Their presentation testifies to the close relationship that Routledge had with both mother and son. In a letter dated 16 May 1956, Sara wrote "I am very glad you should have the off-prints & hope they will be useful". Like Turing, Routledge was a mathematical fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Turing's letters to Routledge are among his most candid, particularly about his sexuality, which he knew Routledge would understand - Routledge himself later lived openly as a gay man. In a 1952 letter, Turing addressed to Routledge his now-famous syllogism: "Turing believes machines think / Turing lies with men / Therefore machines do not think / Yours in distress, Alan" (Hodges, p. xxx). Turing and Newman (1897-1984) first met in mid-1930s Cambridge, when Turing attended the lectures of Newman's Foundation of Mathematics course. Turing's seminal 1936 On Computable Numbers began as a paper on the Entscheidungsproblem that he first showed to Newman, who helped him to publish the work. Turing later studied with Alonzo Church at Princeton on Newman's advice. In early 1940, when Turing was employed as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, he received a letter from Newman, by now his colleague and friend. His response began: "'Dear Newman, Very glad to get your letter, as I needed some stimulus to make me start thinking about logic.'" (Copeland, p. 205). Their resulting correspondence discussed conversion calculus, often referencing a manuscript of Church's titled Mathematical Logic. Ultimately, they produced this paper, which they submitted to Church's Journal of Symbolic Logic in May 1941. Newman joined Turing at Bletchley Park in late August 1942. The offprint is accompanied by a contemporary photostatic copy of a later Turing article, "The Use of Dots as Brackets in Church's System", published in the same journal in December 1942. It is signed by Routledge on the first page. Provenance: Alan Turing (1912-1954); Ethel Sara Turing (1881-1976); Norman Arthur Routledge (1928-2013); by descent in the Routledge family. AMT/B/29; J. Copeland, ed., The Essential Turing, 2004; Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, 1983. Octavo. Original beige wrappers lettered in black, wire-stitched. Covers very peripherally toned, corners a little creased, extending into contents; a near-fine copy of a fragile publication.
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