Max Newman

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Max Newman
Max-newman-1950.jpg
Max Newman on a mountain in North Wales, ca. 1950
Born Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman
(1897-02-07)7 February 1897[1]
54 Lamont Road, Chelsea, London
Died 22 February 1984(1984-02-22) (aged 87)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Nationality British
Fields Mathematics
Institutions University of Cambridge
University of Manchester
Princeton University
Alma mater St John's College, Cambridge[1]
Doctoral students Thomas Graham, Hubert Griffiths, Sze-Tsen Hu, Gilbert Robinson, Hsien Chung Wang[2][3]
Known for Elements of the topology of plane sets of points [4]
Heath Robinson (codebreaking machine)
Newmanry section at Bletchley Park
Newman's lemma
Notable awards Fellow of the Royal Society (1939)[5]

Maxwell Herman Alexander "Max" Newman, FRS[5] (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984) was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus,[6] the first operational electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester which produced the first working stored program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine.[7][8][9][10][11]

Contents

Pre–World War II [edit]

Max Newman was born Maxwell Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, on 7 February 1897.[1] His father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg (now in Poland) who had emigrated with his family to London at the age of 15.[12] Herman worked as a secretary in a company, and married Sarah Ann (Pike), an English schoolteacher, in 1896. The family moved to Dulwich in 1903, and Newman attended Goodrich Road school, then City of London School from 1908.[5] He won a scholarship to study mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in 1915, and in 1916 gained a first in part I of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos.[1]

His studies were postponed by World War I. His father was interned as an enemy alien after the start of the war in 1914, and upon his release he returned to Germany. In 1916, Newman changed his name by deed poll to the anglicised "Newman" and Sarah did likewise in 1920.[13] In January 1917 Newman took up a teaching post at Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School in York, leaving in April 1918. He spent some months in the Royal Army Pay Corps, and then taught at Chigwell School for six months in 1919 before returning to Cambridge.[12] He was called up for military service in February 1918, but claimed conscientious objection due to his beliefs and his father's country of origin, and thereby avoided any direct role in the fighting.[14]

He resumed his interrupted studies in October 1919, and graduated in 1921 as a wrangler (equivalent to a first) in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos, and gained distinction in Schedule B (the equivalent of Part III).[1][12]

On 5 November 1923 he was elected a Fellow of St John's.[5] He worked on the foundations of combinatorial topology, and proposed that a notion of equivalence be defined using only three elementary "moves".[1] Newman's definition avoided difficulties that had arisen from previous definitions of the concept.[1] He also published papers on mathematical logic, and solved a special case of Hilbert's fifth problem.[5]

He was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge in 1927,[1] where his 1935 lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics and Gödel's Theorem inspired Alan Turing to embark on his pioneering work on the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) using a hypothetical computing machine.[15][16] Newman subsequently arranged for Turing to visit Princeton where Alonzo Church was working on the same problem but using his Lambda calculus.[12] Newman wrote Elements of the topology of plane sets of points,[4] a definitive work on general topology, and still highly recommended as an undergraduate text.

In December 1934 he married Lyn Lloyd Irvine, a writer, with Patrick Blackett as best man.[5] They had two sons, Edward (born 1935) and William (born 1939).[12]

World War II [edit]

Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. Newman's father was Jewish, which was of particular concern in the face of Nazi Germany, and Lyn, Edward and William were evacuated to America in July 1940. Newman remained at Cambridge, and at first continued research and lecturing.[12] By spring 1942, he was considering involvement in war work. He made enquiries, and was approached to work for the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley Park. He was cautious, concerned to ensure that the work would be sufficiently interesting and useful, and there was also the possibility that his father's German nationality would rule out any involvement in top-secret work.[17] The potential issues were resolved by the summer, and he agreed to arrive at Bletchley Park on 31 August 1942.[12] He was assigned to the Research Section and set to work on a German teleprinter cipher known as "Tunny". He joined the "Testery" in October.[18] He disliked the work and found that it was not suited to his talents.[1] He persuaded his superiors that codebreaking process could be mechanised, and he was assigned to develop a suitable machine in December 1942.[12] Construction started in January 1943, and the first prototype was delivered in June 1943.[19] It was operated in Newman's new section, termed the "Newmanry", was housed initially in Hut 11 and initially staffed by himself, Donald Michie, two engineers, and 16 Wrens.[20] The Wrens nicknamed the machine the "Heath Robinson", after the cartoonist of the same name who drew humorous drawings of absurd mechanical devices.[20]

The Robinson machines were limited in speed and reliability. Tommy Flowers of the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill had experience of thermionic valves and built an electronic machine, the Colossus computer which was installed in the Newmanry. This was a great success and ten were in use by the end of the war.

Post–World War II [edit]

By September 1945, Newman was appointed head of the Mathematics Department and to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester. Newman lost no time in establishing the renowned Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University and recruited the engineers Frederic Calland Williams and Thomas Kilburn where they built the world's first electronic stored-program digital computer based on Turing's ideas.[21] Newman retired in 1964 to live in Comberton, near Cambridge. After Lyn's death in 1973 he married Margaret Penrose, widow of Lionel Penrose.

He continued to do research on combinatorial topology during a period when England was a major centre of activity notably Cambridge under the leadership of Christopher Zeeman. Newman made important contributions leading to an invitation to present his work at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm at the age of 65, and proved a Generalized Poincaré conjecture for topological manifolds in 1966. He died in Cambridge.

Honours:

The Newman Building at Manchester was named in his honour. The building housed the pure mathematicians from the Victoria University of Manchester between moving out of the Mathematics Tower in 2004 and July 2007 when the School of Mathematics moved into its new Alan Turing Building, where a lecture room is named in his honour.

In 1946 Newman declined the offer of an OBE as he considered the offer derisory.[20] Alan Turing had been awarded an OBE six months earlier and Newman felt that it was inadequate recognition of Turing's contribution to winning the war, referring to it as the "ludicrous treatment of Turing".[12]


References [edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Wylie, Shaun (2004). "Newman , Maxwell Herman Alexander (1897–1984)". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31494.  edit
  2. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Max Newman", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .
  3. ^ Max Newman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ a b Newman, Max (1939). Elements of the topology of plane sets of points. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-24956-3. 
  5. ^ a b c d e f Adams, J. F. (1985). "Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman. 7 February 1897-22 February 1984". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 31: 436–426. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1985.0015.  edit
  6. ^ Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers. Oxford University Press, USA. 2010. ISBN 0-19-957814-1. 
  7. ^ Jack Copeland. "The Modern History of Computing". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 30 Mar 2012. 
  8. ^ http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0275%2FNewman%20M%20H%20A The Papers of Max Newman], St John's College Library
  9. ^ http://www.cdpa.co.uk/Newman/ The Newman Digital Archive], St John's College Library & The University of Portsmouth
  10. ^ Anderson, David (2013). "Max Newman: Forgotten Man of Early British Computing". Communications of the ACM 56 (5): 29–31. doi:10.1145/2447976.2447986.  edit
  11. ^ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h i William Newman, "Max Newman – Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer", pp. 176-188 in Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers. Oxford University Press, USA. 2010. ISBN 0-19-957814-1. 
  13. ^ Anderson, D. (2007). "Max Newman: Topologist, Codebreaker, and Pioneer of Computing". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 (3): 76–81. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2007.4338447.  edit
  14. ^ Paul Gannon, Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers. Oxford University Press, USA. 2010. ISBN 0-19-957814-1.  pp. 225-226,
  15. ^ Turing, A. M. (1937). "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42: 230–265. doi:10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230.  edit
  16. ^ Turing, A. M. (1938). "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. A Correction". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (6): 544–546. doi:10.1112/plms/s2-43.6.544.  edit
  17. ^ Gannon, 2006, p. 227-228
  18. ^ Gannon, 2006, p. 228
  19. ^ Jack Copeland with Catherine Caughey, Dorothy Du Boisson, Eleanor Ireland, Ken Myers, and Norman Thurlow, "Mr Newman's Section", p. 157 of pp. 158-175 in Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers. Oxford University Press, USA. 2010. ISBN 0-19-957814-1. 
  20. ^ a b c Jack Copeland, "Machine against Machine", pp. 64-77 in B. Jack Copeland, ed., in Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers. Oxford University Press, USA. 2010. ISBN 0-19-957814-1. 
  21. ^ Turing, Alan Mathison; Jack Copeland, B (2004). The essential Turing: seminal writings in computing, logic, philosophy .... Oxford University Press. p. 209. ISBN 978-0-19-825080-7. Retrieved 2010-01-27. 
Academic offices
Preceded by
Louis Mordell		 Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics
1945–1964		 Succeeded by
Frank Adams
Authority control
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