Jonathan Swinton on Alan Turing’s Manchester at Blackwell’s
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Join author and mathematician Jonathan Swinton at Blackwell’s University Green as he talks about his non-fiction book Alan Turing’s Manchester, which explores the period of the famous codebreaker and computer expert’s life when he worked at the University of Manchester. Covering the years between 1948 and Turing’s death in 1954, the book follows him from the University seminar rooms to the pick-up sites of Oxford Road, notably the Regal Cinema (now the Dancehouse Theatre), where Turing met the young man who would ultimately lead to his downfall in an era when homosexuality was illegal.
Having posthumously received an official Government apology in 2009 from the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Turing is now largely recognised as a modern martyr, recently voted the most important person of the 20th century in a BBC poll and with a mural at the culmination of the M56 and a statue in Sackville Park.
Swinton – who has written numerous papers on Alan Turing’s work on Fibonacci patterns and in 2012 conceived the international citizen science project Turing’s Sunflowers – will talk about his research into this great scientist and Mancunian icon. He says: ‘I slip in some of the mathematics, computing and biology that brought me to Turing in the first place, so there’s artificial life here. But real life too.’
