Turing’s mentor, Max Newman

Abstract

The interaction between mathematicians and mathematical logicians has always been much slighter than one might imagine. This chapter examines the case of Turing’s mentor, Maxwell Hermann Alexander Newman (1897–1984). The young Turing attended a course of lectures on logical matters that Newman gave at Cambridge University in 1935. After briefly discussing examples of the very limited contact between mathematicians and logicians in the period 1850–1930, I describe the rather surprising origins and development of Newman’s own interest in logic. One might expect that the importance to many mathematicians of means of proving theorems, and their desire in many contexts to improve the level of rigour of proofs, would motivate them to examine and refine the logic that they were using. However, inattention to logic has long been common among mathematicians. A very important source of the cleft between mathematics and logic during the 19th century was the founding, from the late 1810s onwards, of the ‘mathematical analysis’ of real variables, grounded on a theory of limits, by the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy. He and his followers extolled rigour—most especially, careful definitions of major concepts and detailed proofs of theorems. From the 1850s onwards, this project was enriched by the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass and his many followers, who introduced (for example) multiple limit theory, definitions of irrational numbers, and an increasing use of symbols, and then from the early 1870s by Georg Cantor with his set theory. However, absent from all these developments was explicit attention to any kind of logic. This silence continued among the many set theorists who participated in the inauguration of measure theory, functional analysis, and integral equations. The mathematicians Artur Schoenflies and Felix Hausdorff were particularly hostile to logic, targeting the famous 20th-century logician Bertrand Russell. (Even the extensive dispute over the axiom of choice focused mostly on its legitimacy as an assumption in set theory and its use of higher-order quantification: its ability to state an infinitude of independent choices within finitary logic constituted a special difficulty for ‘logicists’ such as Russell.) Russell, George Boole, and other creators of symbolic logics were exceptional among mathematicians in attending to logic, but they made little impact on their colleagues.