You can now get as close to Alan Turing as Turing got to the Nazis: that is, you can read him in his own hand. The London auction house Bonhams will sell one of Alan Turing’s private notebooks. “Made up of 56 pages contained in a simple notebook bought from a stationers in Cambridge, UK, it is almost certainly the only extensive autograph manuscript by Turing in existence,” Bonhams writes. “This notebook shines extra light on how, even when he was enmeshed in great world events, he remained committed to free-thinking work in pure mathematics.”
The ultimate hacker and seminal computer scientist, Alan Turing’s beautiful work and sad end are back in public eye due to Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of the doomed computer scientist in the Oscar-nominated The Imitation Game. Turing was indisputably a genius whose work as a cryptanalyst during WWII helped crack Germany’s Enigma code. Turing’s breach was essential to the Allied victory in the war. Turing was later prosecuted for being gay and punished with injections that caused “chemical castration.” He killed himself with cyanide not long after. The manuscript is expected to sell for at least seven figures, according to Bonhams.
