The Alan Turing Bibliography

assembled by Andrew Hodges

as part of the Alan Turing Website

Alan Turing
Home Page
Guide to the Website

My own book
Alan Turing: the Enigma
(first published 1983,
new edition 1992).
Publication data is on its own Page.

A new text by me on Turing as a philosopher

Turing, no. 3 of a series The Great Philosophers
published by Phoenix (London), 1997.
More details and extracts from the text

The rest of this page is devoted to a complete listing
of Alan Turing's own works as so far known.

Go to this page for more books about Turing and the development of his ideas

Alan Turing's papers

Much of Turing's work was not published in the formal sense of appearance in a scientific journal of the day. Just to detail his papers and to trace their subsequent fate as publications is in itself a substantial task.

Much of his output is now available in The Collected Works of A. M. Turing, but the work of collection and editing is not yet over.

The Collected Works - general remarks

The first three volumes of the annotated Collected Works of A. M. Turing appeared in 1992, just too late for a mention in the Preface to the 1992 edition of my own book. These are:

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

All are published by North-Holland (Amsterdam; London). The overall editor of the series is P. N. Furbank, Alan Turing's literary executor. The fourth volume, Mathematical Logic, is yet to appear. Robin Gandy had not completed his editorship of this volume when he died in November 1995, and his colleague, the logician C. E. M. (Mike) Yates, has now taken it over.

I'm delighted that my own book can now be seen as a complement to this work of scholarship, which has been in progress since 1955. But it's a pity that the Collected Works are so inaccessible. At about $100 each, these volumes are hardly for the private buyer, but now libraries cannot afford them either.

Note: References to the King's College archive below are to the collection of Turing's papers in the Modern Archives Centre at King's College, Cambridge --- see this Archives page.

The individual papers

Rather than list all Turing's papers in chronological order, I shall use the division of topics employed in the Collected Works as the organising principle --- although, as the editors point out, this division is to some extent arbitrary.

Mathematical Logic (the volume as yet unpublished)

On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (2) 42 pp 230-265 (1936); correction ibid. 43, pp 544-546 (1937). Some references will give the year of publication to be 1937; I rely here on Robin Gandy's investigation showing that "Turing's paper appeared in Part 2 of Vol. 42 which was issued in December 1936."
Reprinted with some annotations in The Undecidable..., ed. Martin Davis, Raven, New York (1965)
Computability and lambda-definability, J. Symbolic Logic 2 pp 153-163 (1937)
The p-function in lambda-K conversion, J. Symbolic Logic 2 pp 164- (1937)
Systems of logic based on ordinals, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc (2) 45 pp 161-228 (1939) This was also Turing's Princeton Ph.D. thesis.
Reprinted with some annotations in The Undecidable..., ed. Martin Davis, Raven, New York (1965)
(with M. H. A. Newman) A formal theorem in Church's theory of types, J. Symbolic Logic 7 pp28- (1942)
The use of dots as brackets in Church's system, J. Symbolic Logic 7, pp 146- (1942)
Practical forms of type-theory, J. Symbolic Logic 13, pp 80- (1948)

There are some unpublished manuscripts on mathematical logic in the King's College archive which no doubt will be edited for inclusion in the Collected Works volume when it appears.

Mechanical Intelligence (ed. D. C. Ince)

Proposed Electronic Calculator, Turing's computer plan, was produced as a typescript in early 1946, as an internal National Physical Laboratory document. An original copy is in the Public Record Office in the file DSIR 10/385.
The typescript was reproduced as a publication in the NPL report, Com. Sci. 57 (1972), with a forward by Donald W. Davies.
It was first published in printed form, with the typescript reset in print, in
A. M. Turing's ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers, eds. B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran, MIT Press (1986). Volume 10 in the Charles Babbage Institute reprint series for the History of Computing.
The editors worked in detail through Turing's programming and annotated extensively, with a long introduction.
In the Collected Works, the 1946 report is reproduced in the MIT Press typography, but without Carpenter and Doran's detailed notes; instead Darrel Ince has annotated afresh.
The Automatic Computing Engine, Lectures given at the Ministry of Supply, December 1946 and January 1947, by Turing and J. H. Wilkinson. A report on these was written by T. H. Marshall, Military College of Science, Shrivenham, February 1947.
Not included in the Collected Works.
Lecture to the London Mathematical Society, February 1947. This was never published, but the typescript is in the King's College archive. Large extracts appeared in my book and then the complete paper was published in 1986 in the same MIT Press volume as a companion to the 1946 report.
Again, the Collected Works reproduces the paper in the MIT typography, but with fresh annotations.
Intelligent Machinery, the report written by Turing for the NPL at the end of summer 1948. The typescript is in the King's College archive. The paper was first published in 1968, within the book
Cybernetics: Key Papers, eds. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson, University Park Press, Baltimore Md.and Manchester (1968)
However this edition seems to have escaped notice, and was only recently brought to my attention by Jean Lassegue and Berenice Chimienti.
Turing's paper was then published in 1969 as
Intelligent Machinery, Machine Intelligence 5, pp 3-23, Edinburgh University Press (1969), with an introduction by Donald Michie.
The Collected Works reproduces the 1969 edition typography, which unfortunately includes some misprints.
Checking a Large Routine, Paper for the EDSAC Inaugural Conference, 24 June 1949. Typescript published in Report of a Conference on High Speed Automatic Calculating machines, pp 67-69.
Reprinted with corrections and annotations in
An early program proof by Alan Turing, L. Morris and C. B. Jones, Ann. Hist. Computing 6 (2) pp 129-143 (1984).
The Collected Works reproduces the original typescript.
Programmers Handbook, Manchester University Computing Laboratory (1951)
Never published; not in the Collected Works.
Local Programming Methods and Conventions, in the Manchester University Computer Inaugural Conference, July 1951.
Never republished; not in the Collected Works.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 49, pp 433-460 (1950)
Reprinted under the title Can a Machine Think, in The World of Mathematics, ed. James R. Newman, pp 2099-2123, Simon & Schuster (1956); and in several other anthologies.
It is partially reprinted in The Mind's I, Douglas. R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books (1981).
The Collected Works reproduces the original Mind typography.
Chess, a subsection of chapter 25, Digital Computers Applied to Games, of Faster than Thought, ed. B. V. Bowden, Pitman, London (1953)
The editor of the Collected Works has wrongly attributed to Turing the entirety of this chapter. He wrote only the part on chess. The part on draughts was by Christopher Strachey and (I assume) that on Nim by Audrey Bates; the introductory remarks are (I assume) by Bowden.
Intelligent Machinery: A heretical theory, a talk given by Turing at Manchester, typescript in the King's College archive, included in Sara Turing's memoir (see the next page of the Bibliography). Not included in the Collected Works.
Radio broadcasts, 1951 and 1952, transcripts in the King's College archive; never published and not included in the Collected Works.
Solvable and Unsolvable Problems, Science News 31, pp 7-23 (1954) is included in this volume of the Collected Works but also in the Pure Mathematics volume.

Pure Mathematics (ed. J. L. Britton)

Each of the published papers is reproduced in the original form in this volume of the Collected Works, togther with an introduction, summary, notes, and detailed checking to a standard far beyond the ordinary.

Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity, J. London Math. Soc. 10, pp 284-285 (1935)
Finite Approximations to Lie Groups, Ann. of Math. 39 (1), pp 105-111 (1938)
The Extensions of a Group, Compositio Math. 5, pp 357-367 (1938)
A Method for the Calculation of the Zeta-Function, Proc. London Math. Soc. (2) pp 180-197 (1943, submitted 1939)
Rounding-off Errors in Matrix Processes, Quart. J. Mech. Appl. Math. 1, pp 287-308 (1948)
The Word problem in Semi-Groups with Cancellation, Ann. of Math. 52 (2), pp 491-505 (1950)
Some Calculations of the Riemann Zeta-function, Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) pp 99-117 (1953)
Solvable and Unsolvable Problems, Science News 31, pp 7-23 (1954) is included in this volume as well as in the Mechanical Intelligence volume.

The same level of scholarship is extended to Turing's unpublished pure mathematical papers, where the editor's difficulties are magnified by the illegibility and incompleteness of the manuscripts. The originals (with one exception, a photocopy) are in the King's College archive.

On the Gaussian Error Function, King's College Fellowship dissertation (1935).
Only the Preface is reproduced in the Collected Works.
A Note on Normal Numbers
The Word Problem in Compact Groups
On Permutation Groups. The typescript as shown in my book, page 283, stimulated by Enigma analysis, is here deciphered as a problem in finite group theory unsolved today.
The difference psi(x) - x
(with S. Skewes) On a Theorem of Littlewood

Two further published papers by other authors, substantially the result of completing Turing's work, are included in this volume of the Collected Works:

An Analysis of Turing's "The Word problem in Semi-groups with Cancellation", W. W. Boone, Ann. of Math. 67 (1) pp. 195-202
On the Difference pi(x) - li(x), A. M. Cohen and M. J. E. Mayhew, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 18, pp 691-713

There are further notes by Turing in the King's College archive on game theory, and on tensors and spinors, but these are not included in this volume.

Neither is the one headed Minimum cost sequential analysis, which carries some of the content of the statistical theory Turing developed for cryptanalysis. However the editor has included:

Studies in the History of Probability and Statistics, XXXVII A. M. Turing's statistical work in World War II, I. J. Good, Biometrika 66 (2) pp 393-396 (1979)
Introductory remarks for the article in Biometrika 66 (1979), I. J. Good, especially written for this volume.

Morphogenesis (ed. P. T. Saunders)

The only published paper by Turing is:

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London B 237 pp 37-72 (1952)

This volume of the Collected Works then includes

A Diffusion Reaction Theory of Mophogenesis in Plants, written with C. W. Wardlaw.
This complete typescript went unpublished, presumably because Turing preferred the botanist Wardlaw to publish alone his paper A commentary on Turing's diffusion-reaction theory of morphogenesis, New Phytol. 52, pp 40-47.

Now follow the editor's completions of Turing's manuscripts on the Morphogen Theory of Phyllotaxis, divided into

I. Geometrical and Descriptive Phyllotaxis
II. Chemical Theory of Morphogenesis
III. (with B. Richards) A Solution of the Morphogenetic Equations for the Case of Spherical Symmetry

and finally

Outline of the Development of the Daisy

Cryptanalytic Work

On 4 April 1996 the National Security Agency (USA) declassified thousands of documents from the Second World War, including

NR 964 CBCB55 9024A 19390000 TURING'S TREATISE ON THE ENIGMA

See this page of the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook for excerpts from this newly revealed work.

I hope that some annotated extracts from this work will also appear in the fourth volume of the Collected Works. It is still possible that further work by Turing will yet appear when released from government secrecy.

Alan Turing Home Page
Guide to the Website
Bibliography
More books about Turing

I am always grateful for comment: andrew.hodges@wadh.ox.ac.uk

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