Coordinates | 12°58′0″N77°34′0″N |
---|---|
name | Max Newman |
birth date | February 07, 1897 |
birth place | 54 Lamont Road, Chelsea, London |
death date | February 22, 1984 |
death place | Cambridge, United Kingdom |
nationality | |
field | Mathematics |
work institution | University of CambridgeUniversity of Manchester |
alma mater | University of Cambridge |
known for | Elements of the topology of plane sets of points (1939)Heath Robinson (codebreaking machine)Newmanry section at Bletchley Park }} |
Maxwell Herman Alexander "Max" Newman, FRS (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984) was a British mathematician and codebreaker.
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, Max changed his name using a Deed of change of name to the anglicised "Newman" and Sarah did likewise in 1920. For national service, Max taught at Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School in York, worked in the Royal Army Pay Corps, and taught at Chigwell School. 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.
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 inspired Alan Turing to embark on his pioneering work on computing machines. Newman wrote Elements of the topology of plane sets of points (1939), a definitive work on general topology, and still highly recommended as an undergraduate text. In December 1934 he married Lyn Lloyd Irvine, a writer. They had two sons, Edward (born 1935) and William (born 1939).
He was assigned to the Research Section and set to work on a German teleprinter cipher known as "Tunny". He joined the "Testery" in October. He disliked the work and found that it was not suited to his talents. He persuaded his superiors that codebreaking process could be mechanised, and he was assigned to develop a suitable machine in December 1942. Construction started in January 1943, and the first prototype was delivered in June 1943. It was operated in Newman's new section, termed the "Newmanry", was housed initially in Hut 11 and initially staffed by himself, Donald Michie, two engineers, and 16 Wrens. The Wrens nicknamed the machine the "Heath Robinson", after the cartoonist of the same name who drew humorous drawings of absurd mechanical devices.
The Robinson machines were limited in speed and reliability. Tommy Flowers of the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill had experience of thermionic valves and built an electronic machine, the Colossus computer which was installed in the Newmanry. This was a great success and ten were in use by the end of the war.
He continued to do research on combinatorial topology during a period when England was a major centre of activity notably Cambridge under the leadership of Christopher Zeeman. Newman made important contributions leading to an invitation to present his work at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm at the age of 65, and proved a Generalized Poincaré conjecture for topological manifolds in 1966. He died in Cambridge.
Honours:
The Newman Building at Manchester was named in his honour. The building housed the pure mathematicians from the Victoria University of Manchester between moving out of the Mathematics Tower in 2004 and July 2007 when the School of Mathematics moved in to its new Alan Turing Building, where a lecture room is named in his honour.
In 1946 Newman declined the offer of an OBE in protest against the "ludicrous treatment" of Alan Turing, who had received the same award for his vital war work.
Category:Computer pioneers Category:Pre-computer cryptographers Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge Category:English mathematicians Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:People associated with Bletchley Park Category:Old Citizens (City of London School) Category:Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Category:People from Chelsea, London Category:Academics of the University of Manchester Category:British conscientious objectors Category:1897 births Category:1984 deaths
de:Max Newman es:Max Newman fr:Max Newman ht:Max Newman pt:Max Newman sl:Max Newman fi:Max NewmanThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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