Bletchley Park tweet saves Alan Turing computing papers (BBC)

There is something quite fitting that a single tweet sparked off a campaign to save the work of a man who helped to develop the world's first modern computer.

This, in turn, led to the development of an exhibition devoted to his life and work.

Rare mathematical papers written by Alan Turing are now part of a new display at the World War II codebreaking centre Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.

Turing, who took his own life in 1954 at the age of 41, helped to create the Bombe machine which was used to crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park and later created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer.

During his life he only published 18 papers and gave offprints of 15 of them to his friend Professor Max Newman.

But after Newman's death, they changed hands a number of times and could have been lost to a private collector had it not been for the actions of a member of the Bletchley Park staff.
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-17256951




I was going to post this in Science, but thought it might be of wider interest.