Max Newman

Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman , born as Max Neumann (born  February 7, 1897 in London , †  February 22, 1984 in Comberton near Cambridge ) was a British mathematician and cryptanalyst . During the Second World War he contributed significantly to the deciphering of the encrypted secret German communications in Bletchley Park . He worked as a mathematician in the fields of topology and logic .

Life

Max Neumann was born the son of his German father Hermann Alexander Neumann in the Chelsea district of London . His father's family came from the then German town of Bromberg , which is now in Poland. Hermann Neumann and his family emigrated from Germany to England at the age of 15 and later worked there as a secretary in a company. In 1896, Hermann Neumann married the English elementary school teacher Sarah Ann Pike, who came from a British farming family. A year later she gave birth to Max.

The Neumann family moved to the London borough of Dulwich in 1903 and little Max first attended the school on Goodrich Road and, from 1908 , the City of London School , located directly in the City of London on the Thames . In 1915 Max Neumann was awarded a scholarship for mathematics at St John's College in Cambridge.

As a result of the First World War, his studies, in which he achieved top marks in the first part of the Tripos exams, suffered , and especially his family. At the beginning of the war, in 1914, his father was imprisoned in an internment camp as an " enemy alien " . After his release he left the country and returned to Germany. Max and his mother stayed in England and in 1916 Anglicized their family name to Newman .

In February 1918 Max was supposed to be called up for British military service, but, with reference to his conscience and German roots, he refused and he managed to avoid participating in combat operations. In October 1919 he resumed his studies in Cambridge, which had been interrupted by the World War, and graduated in 1921. On November 5, 1923, he received the status of a fellow of St John's College. In 1922/23 he was with Kurt Reidemeister in Vienna, where he began to deal with topology. In 1928/29 and 1937/38 he was with the topologist James Waddell Alexander at Princeton University .

From 1927 Newman held lectures in mathematics at Cambridge as a lecturer . One of his students in a lecture on mathematical logic in 1935 was Alan Turing , who, inspired by Newman, laid the theoretical foundations for modern computers only one year later with his work On computable numbers (see also: Turing machine ). Newman also got Turing on a scholarship at Princeton at Alonzo Church . In December 1934 Newman married the English writer Lyn Lloyd Irvine, who gave him two sons, Edward (* 1935) and William (* 1939).

On September 3, 1939, two days after the German attack on Poland , Britain declared the German Reich the war . Since Newman, and thus his children, were of Jewish descent and they were in great danger because of the impending invasion of England and because of the National Socialist racial ideology , his children were evacuated to the United States with their mother as a precaution . Max Newman himself stayed in Cambridge and initially continued his usual teaching and research tasks. In the spring of 1942, however, he applied to be allowed to take on important military tasks. He feared that because of his German ancestry, he would not be considered for secret government projects. Despite his fears, his application fell on fertile ground, and from August 31, 1942 he worked as a cryptanalyst in Bletchley Park, about 70 km north-west of London , deciphering the encrypted secret German communications.

A radio telex sent encrypted from Berlin to Army Group Courland on February 14, 1945 using the Lorenz key machine , which was deciphered in BP as a Tunny message .

There he was assigned to a research department which, under the direction of Major Ralph Tester , dealt specifically with the deciphering of the German telex connections , which were encrypted with the Lorenz key suffix SZ42 . The British code breakers gave this procedure the code name "Tunny" (German: " Tunfisch "). As is customary in Bletchley Park, the department was named after its head and was referred to as " Testery ". After a short time Newman showed himself to be unsatisfied with the laborious manual methods of deciphering practiced there and saw his talent being wasted there. As early as December 1942, he was able to convince his superiors that the German key addition could be deciphered more efficiently using suitable machine processes, the development and construction of which he proposed.

Construction began in January 1943 and the first prototype of the new decoding machine was available in June of the same year. It was set up in Newman's own new department, which was called "Newmanry" after his name and was initially housed in Hut 11 (German: Baracke 11). His team included his colleague Donald Michie , two engineers and 16 female assistants ( Wrens ). The Wrens nicknamed the machine “ Heath Robinson ” after the English cartoonist and illustrator William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), who also drew particularly tricky and absurd mechanical machines.

Another employee, Tommy Flowers , later developed the Colossus machines under the direction of Max Newman in the Newmanry , which were also used very successfully against the German key addition .

After the Second World War, in 1945 , Newman received the Fielden Chair in Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester (as the successor to Louis Mordell ), which he held until 1964. There he was also head of the Faculty of Mathematics. He continued his work on combinatorial topology from the 1920s and 1930s and, in 1966, made important contributions to the proof of the generalized Poincaré conjecture in higher dimensions. He also worked as a topologist with John Henry Constantine Whitehead , with whom he was also friends. In Manchester, right after the war, Newman started a project to build an electronic computer in the Royal Society Computer Machine Laboratory, which he founded in 1946, for which he brought Alan Turing, who was a friend of his, to Manchester. The first electronic computer with program memory ( Manchester Baby ) was built there in 1948 , even before the EDSAC (1949) by Maurice Wilkes in Cambridge.

In retirement he moved to Comberton, a small town near Cambridge with about 2000 inhabitants in the English county of Cambridgeshire . Even after his retirement he gave courses at the newly founded University of Warwick , where E. C. Zeeman had built up a very active group of mathematicians in the field of topology and dynamic systems. After the death of his wife Lyn in 1973, he married Margaret Penrose, Lionel Penrose's widow and professor of physiology. Max Newman lived in Comberton until his death in 1984.

In his spare time he played the piano and was a strong chess player.

Honors

In 1939 Newman was accepted as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1958 awarded him the Sylvester Medal for his contributions to combinatorial topology, Boolean algebra and mathematical logic. In 1962 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Geometrical Topology ). From 1949 to 1951 he was President of the London Mathematical Society , whose de Morgan Medal he received in 1962. In 1968 he received an honorary doctorate (D. Sc.) From the University of Hull .

After the end of the Second World War, Newman was awarded the OBE for his work in Bletchley Park , but refused to accept it because he found Alan Turing's award (also "just" an OBE) for his contribution to Enigma deciphering to be ridiculously undervalued.

Fonts

• Elements of the topology of plane sets of points. Cambridge University Press, 1939. New edition: Greenwood Press, 1985.

See also

• Newman's theorem

literature

• Friedrich L. Bauer : Deciphered Secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 .
• Francis Harry Hinsley , Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park. Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, ISBN 0-19-280132-5 .
• John Frank Adams Max Herman Alexander Newman (= Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society. Volume 31). 1985, p. 426.
• William Newman Max Newman - Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer. In: B. Jack Copeland (Ed.): Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. Oxford University Press, 2006 (William Newman is the son of Max Newman).
• DP Anderson: Max Newman: Topologist, Codebreaker and Pioneer of Computing. In: Annals of the History of Computing. Volume 29, 2007, pp. 76-81.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Max Newman. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Max Newman in the honor roll (Roll of Honor) of Bletchley Park
• The Papers of Max Newman . St John's College Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jack Copeland (Ed.): Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine . Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 3 (introduction)
2. ^ Entry on Newman; Maxwell Herman Alexander (1897–1984) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
3. ^ William Newman's website on the collaboration between Turing and Newman