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The Turing Archive
The most important collection of Alan Turing's papers is held in the Modern Archives Centre at King's College, Cambridge.
The archivists have prepared a summary of the Archive.
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The Modern Archives Centre, King's College, Cambridge |
The Turing Digital Archive
Since June 2000 the material has available on-line as the Turing Digital Archive.
This material is presented in an archival format without much editorial comment, but with a search engine.
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Jonathan Swinton, then a Fellow of King's College, and a leading scholar of Turing's morphogenesis manuscripts, shows the new Digital Archive to guests of the Turing/Keynes event, 24 June 2000. |
The Manchester file
In May 2016, while reorganising the storeroom of the Department of Computer Science at Manchester University, Professor Jim Miles discovered a file of Turing's professional correspondence, as kept by his departmental secretary. This is now
available and catalogued at Manchester University library.
A note on 'papers'
There is an ambiguity about the expression 'papers' in scientific and academic work. It may refer to published papers, or to personal papers. This Archives page primarily concerns the preservation of Turing's personal papers. These do include important material relating to his published scientific work: manuscripts, typescripts, his own offprint copies, and correspondence. But the essential point is that they are uniquely and irreplaceably connected with his life.
His published papers are listed on this page, together with scientific writing which went unpublished in his lifetime but has subsequently appeared in print, some completed by other hands.
In 2010 there was much in the news about a campaign to save 'Turing's papers'. See a BBC report here. Some people may have believed this to be a campaign to save Turing's personal papers. Indeed this newspaper report described them as his 'secret papers'. In fact, the papers concerned were M. H. A. Newman's collection of offprints of Turing's published work. The personal papers were, all the time, safe in the hands of King's College, Cambridge. In the end, Newman's collection was acquired by Google for a vast sum and can be seen in the Bletchley Park Museum. See a BBC report here.
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Photographs of Alan TuringThere are not many photographs of Alan Turing, and most of them are of him as a boy. There are copies of them in the Turing Archive at King's College. Scans of the photographs can be seen in the Turing Digital Archive. If you are searching for pictures of Alan Turing to illustrate a publication, you should go to the Digital Archive and follow the instructions for obtaining copies. The archivist will assist you with copyright questions.
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| The portrait photograph on the right was taken at the time of Alan Turing's election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1951. There is another one, taken at the same session but in a slightly different pose, which was used by the Royal Society for illustrating the Biographical Memoir of Turing in 1955. These portraits have frequently been reproduced on the Web, but the copyright of them belongs to the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In 2009 the National Portrait Gallery included Alan Turing's portrait in a special exhibition of Gay Icons. It was chosen by Lord Chris Smith, who made a notable statement about Alan Turing in 1998, and became Chancellor of Cambridge University in 2026.
|  National Portrait Gallery |
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