#Turing for Christmas

As Christmas approaches perhaps you want to Turing theme your Christmas gifts. A new childrens book, by Paul Morris, has a Turing connection: "Time Traveller Danny and the Codebreaker."  The book, which is part of the Time Traveller Kids series for 7 to 12 year olds, tells the story of Danny who goes back in time and meets Alan Turing.  Paul carried out background research for the book using the archives at Sherborne School where Alan was a student from 1926 to 1931.  Paul also has a family connection with Turing because his father, then a clerk in a Manchester firm of solicitors, witnessed the signing of Turing’s will in February 1954.
    Thanks to The Alan Turing Year for this information.

The Sherborne Formula - the making of Alan #Turing

The current edition of the Sherborne School magazine Vivat! features an excellent 12 page article about Alan Turing's experience at Sherborne written by the school's archivist Rachel Hassal. The article covers Turing's complete time at the Dorset public school (note that in England "public" schools are exclusive private schools) to when he left for Kings College Cambridge.
   It includes many details of his time there and in particular describes the influence a physics teacher, Henry Gervis, and a mathematics teacher, Ben Davis, had on him. Interestingly Ben Davis was the only teacher then at Sherborne who had a PhD. The article features many photos of Turing I've not seen before and gives an excellent account of his school days. You can download a pdf scan (14Mb) of the article from The Universal Machine's website: http://www.theuniversalmachine.com/Vivat(Turing).pdf

Turing (front row far left), aged 13, at Westcott House Sherborne, 1926