Dr. David Paul Anderson

I am particularly interested in the development of the electronic digital computer. I begin in 1936 with Turing’s paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” and finish, more or less, with Turing’s death in 1954. This captures well most of the significant early developments in the field on both sides of the Atlantic and opens up for study a number of areas which have received little attention elsewhere or have been treated with less rigour than one would hope. I am currently focussed on the, largely unknown, contribution to early computing of the Cambridge topologist Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman. This has led me to investigate Newman's attempt to build a computer at the University of Manchester immediately after the end of WWII. My research has been able to show that the conventional history of the period is substantially in error. I have been able to uncover three significant "myths" which underlie much of the dominant discourse in British History of Computing.