Who was Max Newman?

Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. To all his friends, he was simply known as Max Newman.

Newman's primary area of specialization was Combinatorial Topology, but he had a keen interest in other fields of mathematics. In the spring of 1935, Max Newman taught a class on Foundations of Mathematics. This was somewhat outside his area of expertise, but with which he was nevertheless very familiar, and he even included Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem as part of that course.

This was a class that Alan Turing attended as a student, and it was also this class that persuaded him to think of his Turing Machine as a way to resolve the problem of the Entscheidungsproblem.

Alan Turing regarded Max Newman as his mentor, and in 1936, showed him a copy of his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem". When Newman found out that his friend at Princeton, Alonzo Church, had just discovered the solution of the Entscheidungsproblem and was ready to publish it, he encouraged Alan Turing to publish his paper as well as soon as possible. He also suggested that Turing continue his studies of mathematics at Princeton University with Dr. Church as his Ph.D. advisor.

---

In May of 1942, during World War II, Max Newman was approached by the British Government to join the team at Bletchley Park in their secret work of codebreaking. By this time, Alan Turing was already working at Bletchley Park, and had already cracked the German Enigma code using his Bombe computer. However, at this time, the Germans were using another machine for coding their messages, called the Lorenz.

Max Newman was instrumental in developing the Colossus to break the German Lorenz code. The Colossus was the world's first computer to use vacuum tubes.