Turing’s undergraduate copy of Russell’s logical primer, signed and dated

Russell, Bertrand. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.

€ 35,000.00

Turing’s signed copy of Russell’s concise exposition of the logical foundations of mathematics, acquired in March 1933 during his final undergraduate year at King’s College, Cambridge.

Considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, the British mathematician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist Alan Turing (1912-54) studied as an undergraduate at King's from February 1931 to November 1934, graduating with first-class honours in mathematics. His dissertation, "On the Gaussian error function", delivered in November 1934, proved a version of the central limit theorem.

Russell’s work distilled the ambition of "Principia Mathematica" into an accessible account of number, order, classes and infinity, shaping the logical curriculum read by a generation of Cambridge students. For Turing, the book’s treatment of logical types and the scope and limits of formal methods offered a first sustained encounter with problems he would soon recast in mechanical terms, leading toward the 1936 paper on computable numbers and universal machines. The volume thus stands at a nexus between Russell’s logicism and Turing’s foundational redefinition of effective procedure, linking two decisive moments in twentieth century thought.