Alan Turing's Scientific Papers

These pages give a listing of the scientific material that now exists in the form of published papers, with links to on-line versions. Almost everything Turing wrote is now accessible on-line in some form, much of it in the Turing Digital Archive.

It should be noted, however, that much evidence of Turing's thought is to be found in his personal correspondence. These are mostly (but not all) in the archives of Turing's personal papers: see these notes on Turing archives and photographs. This material was used extensively in Alan Turing: the Enigma. It is not listed here.

See also the BibNet bibliography maintained by Nelson H. F. Beebe, University of Utah.

The Collected Works of A. M. Turing

• Mechanical Intelligence, ed. Darrel Ince, ISBN 0-444-88058-5
• Morphogenesis, ed. P. T. Saunders, ISBN 0-444-88486-6
• Pure Mathematics, ed. J. L. Britton, ISBN 0-444-88059-3

• Mathematical Logic, eds. R. O. Gandy and C. E. M. Yates, ISBN 0-444-50423-0.

All were published by North-Holland (Amsterdam; London). The overall editor of the series was P. N. Furbank, Alan Turing's literary executor until his death in June 2014.

Alan Turing: His Work and Impact

A new 944-page compendium of Turing's papers and modern commentaries, edited by S. Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen, appeared in July 2013, following the Turing Centenary year of 2012. It is more accessible than the earlier Collected Works. It does not contain all Turing's papers, not even all the published papers, but its commentaries are much more extensive.

The Essential Turing

Copeland's selection and his editorial comments are controversial. See my critical review in a special edition of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

The Undecidable

To mark the centenary in 2012, Princeton University Press published Turing's Princeton Ph.D. thesis, subsequently published as Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals (1939). Introductory essays by Andrew W. Appel and Solomon Feferman are included. See the PUP page or order from Amazon here.

The following items are not works of Alan Turing himself, but in different ways include material from sources close to him.

• Alan Mathison Turing, M. H. A. Newman, in Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society, 1955.

  This is reproduced in Part III of the Mathematical Logic volume of the Collected Works, and (typographically reset) in the Impact volume.

  The Biographical Memoir is now available as a pdf file directly from the Royal Society.

  Indeed the entire series of Biographical Memoirs is available, including the memoir of M. H. A. Newman, also relevant to Alan Turing.

• A handwritten letter from Robin Gandy to M. H. A. Newman, June 1954. Gandy summarised Turing's unfinished work as it stood at the time of his death, including a description of Turing's ideas about quantum mechanics. The text of this letter appears in Part III of the Mathematical Logic volume of the Collected Works, preceded by a preface by myself.

  There is a scan of Robin Gandy's letter in the Turing Digital Archive.

• Alan M. Turing, Sara Turing, Heffers, Cambridge (1959). This was republished by Cambridge University Press in 2012, together with an introduction by Martin Davis and a further memoir by John Turing, Alan Turing's brother. Order from Amazon.


• The Universal Turing Machine, a Half-Century Survey, ed. R. Herken, Kammerer & Unversagt, Hamburg, and Oxford University Press (1988). The volume contains important analytical articles on Turing's own work by leading logicians of his era:
  
  
  • Stephen C. Kleene, Turing's Analysis of Computability, and Major Applications of It
  • Robin Gandy, The Confluence of Ideas in 1936
  • Solomon Feferman, Turing in the Land of O(Z)
  • Martin Davis, Mathematical Logic and the Origin of Modern Computing.
  
  
  Martin Davis's book The Universal Computer (Norton, 2000) is an important development of the material in his article.


• Codebreakers, F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (eds.), Oxford University Press (1993), paperback edition with corrections (1994). This contains important articles on Turing's cryptanalytic contributions by his colleagues in the codebreaking work, in particular I. J. Good and Joan Murray.


• Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939, ed. Cora Diamond, Harvester Press (1976). A complete transcript of the discussions from contemporary notes, including Turing's participation.