Max Newman

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Max Newman bigraphy, stories - Mathematicians

Max Newman : biography

7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984

Maxwell Herman Alexander "Max" Newman, FRS (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984) was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the first operational electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester which produced the first working stored program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine.

http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0275%2FNewman%20M%20H%20A The Papers of Max Newman], St John’s College Libraryhttp://www.cdpa.co.uk/Newman/ The Newman Digital Archive], St John’s College Library & The University of Portsmouth

Pre–World War II

Max Newman was born Maxwell Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, on 7 February 1897. His father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg (now in Poland) who had emigrated with his family to London at the age of 15.William Newman, "Max Newman – Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer", pp. 176-188 in Herman worked as a secretary in a company, and married Sarah Ann (Pike), an English schoolteacher, in 1896. The family moved to Dulwich in 1903, and Newman attended Goodrich Road school, then City of London School from 1908. He won a scholarship to study mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge in 1915, and in 1916 gained a first in part I of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos.

His studies were postponed by World War I. His father was interned as an enemy alien after the start of the war in 1914, and upon his release he returned to Germany. In 1916, Newman changed his name by deed poll to the anglicised "Newman" and Sarah did likewise in 1920. In January 1917 Newman took up a teaching post at Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School in York, leaving in April 1918. He spent some months in the Royal Army Pay Corps, and then taught at Chigwell School for six months in 1919 before returning to Cambridge. He was called up for military service in February 1918, but claimed conscientious objection due to his beliefs and his father’s country of origin, and thereby avoided any direct role in the fighting.Paul Gannon, pp. 225-226,

He resumed his interrupted studies in October 1919, and graduated in 1921 as a wrangler (equivalent to a first) in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos, and gained distinction in Schedule B (the equivalent of Part III).

On 5 November 1923 he was elected a Fellow of St John’s. He worked on the foundations of combinatorial topology, and proposed that a notion of equivalence be defined using only three elementary "moves". Newman’s definition avoided difficulties that had arisen from previous definitions of the concept. He also published papers on mathematical logic, and solved a special case of Hilbert’s fifth problem.

He was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge in 1927, where his 1935 lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics and Gödel’s Theorem inspired Alan Turing to embark on his pioneering work on the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) using a hypothetical computing machine. Newman subsequently arranged for Turing to visit Princeton where Alonzo Church was working on the same problem but using his Lambda calculus. Newman wrote Elements of the topology of plane sets of points, a definitive work on general topology, and still highly recommended as an undergraduate text.

In December 1934 he married Lyn Lloyd Irvine, a writer, with Patrick Blackett as best man. They had two sons, Edward (born 1935) and William (born 1939).

Post–World War II

By September 1945, Newman was appointed head of the Mathematics Department and to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester. Newman lost no time in establishing the renowned Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University and recruited the engineers Frederic Calland Williams and Thomas Kilburn where they built the world’s first electronic stored-program digital computer based on Turing’s ideas. Newman retired in 1964 to live in Comberton, near Cambridge. After Lyn’s death in 1973 he married Margaret Penrose, widow of Lionel Penrose.