12 November 2026, 16:00 - 18:30
"Alan Turing, The Absent Father of Computing" by Andrew Hodges (University of Oxford)
Alan Turing (1912-1954) has often been dubbed the ‘Father’ of computing, this vague word conveying the complex connection between On Computable Numbers in 1936, the digital computing plans of 1945, the first working electronic computers in 1948-51, and computer science thereafter. I will address this complexity, starting with an update on the well-known question of whether and how von Neumann’s EDVAC report of 1945 was related to Turing’s work. But my emphasis will be on what happened after 1945, regarding it as a puzzle that Turing drew so little attention to his own 1936 foundations, despite their relevance to his famous Intelligent Machinery predictions. His extraordinary reticence affected the emergent science and technology of computing, as I will illustrate with some little-known documents. My conclusion is summarised in the title: it is fair to consider him a ‘father’, but he avoided taking either praise or responsibility for his offspring
Online attendance is possible via Zoom after a registration.