The Bletchley Park Codebreakers in Their Own Words by Joel Greenberg

Author:Joel Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
Publisher: Greenhill Books
Published: 2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Max Newman

Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman was born on 7 February 1897 in London. He attended the City of London School and from there he gained a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, which he took up in 1915. His education was interrupted by WW1 during which he undertook work related to the war, doing various jobs such as army paymaster and schoolmaster. He returned to Cambridge after the war and graduated in 1921. He became a Fellow of St John’s College in 1923.

Newman taught a course on the foundations of mathematics at Cambridge and it was his lectures which introduced Turing to the concept of ‘decidability’. This in turn inspired Turing’s famous paper, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, which was published with considerable help from Newman.

In 1939 Newman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1942 he joined GC&CS. He soon devised a way of carrying forward the work of John Tiltman and Bill Tutte in breaking the German Lorenz cipher system. Machines were designed and built to help with the codebreaking work, the best known being called Robinson and Colossus. Newman was given charge of a section to progress this work and it soon became known as the Newmanry.

At the end of the war Newman was appointed to a chair as Fielden Professor of Mathematics at Manchester University. He received the Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society in 1958 in recognition of his distinguished contributions to combinatory topology, Boolean algebras and mathematical logic. He retired in 1964 but continued his research until his death on 22 February 1984, aged 87.

The following correspondence is a unique record of the process by which senior British academics came to work at BP.10 The first approach to Newman was from Frank Adcock, a former Cambridge don, who had worked in Room 40 during WW1. He had been tasked with trawling through the staff and student lists at both Oxford and Cambridge looking for suitable recruits for GC&CS. At the same time, Newman was also approached by P. M. S. Blackett, a government advisor on military strategy and developing operational research. Blackett had initially mentioned Newman to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey.

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