Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

3IVORY TOWERS AND TEA ROOMS

Martin Campbell-Kelly

MAURICE WILKES AND THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY MATHEMATICAL LABORATORY

Cambridge University had established a computing facility before the Second World War, and there was an indirect link with Manchester University. At Manchester Douglas Hartree, Professor of Applied Mathematics, had learned of the differential analyser, an analogue computing machine for solving differential equations that had been invented by the engineer Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930. Hartree built a small differential analyser out of Meccano in 1934 and it proved to be surprisingly accurate and effective. So much so, that the theoretical chemist Professor John Lennard-Jones at Cambridge ...