Max Newman's father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg, who had emigrated with his family to London at the age of 15.
33 Facts About Max Newman
2.
The family moved to Dulwich in 1903, and Newman attended Goodrich Road school, then City of London School from 1908.
3.
Max Newman won a scholarship to study mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in 1915, and in 1916 gained a First in Part I of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos.
4.
In January 1917, Max Newman took up a teaching post at Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School in York, leaving in April 1918.
5.
Max Newman spent some months in the Royal Army Pay Corps, and then taught at Chigwell School for six months in 1919 before returning to Cambridge.
6.
Max Newman was called up for military service in February 1918, but claimed conscientious objection due to his beliefs and his father's country of origin, and thereby avoided any direct role in the fighting.
7.
Max Newman's dissertation considered the use of "symbolic machines" in physics, foreshadowing his later interest in computing machines.
8.
On 5 November 1923, Max Newman was elected a Fellow of St John's.
9.
Max Newman worked on the foundations of combinatorial topology, and proposed that a notion of equivalence be defined using only three elementary "moves".
10.
Max Newman's definition avoided difficulties that had arisen from previous definitions of the concept.
11.
Max Newman wrote Elements of the topology of plane sets of points, a work on general topology and undergraduate text.
12.
Max Newman published papers on mathematical logic, and solved a special case of Hilbert's fifth problem.
13.
Max Newman was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge in 1927.
14.
In spring 1936, Max Newman was presented by Turing with a draft of "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem".
15.
Max Newman realised the paper's importance and helped ensure swift publication.
16.
Max Newman subsequently arranged for Turing to visit Princeton where Alonzo Church was working on the same problem but using his Lambda calculus.
17.
However, in July 1938, after he returned to Cambridge, Max Newman discovered that his proof was fatally flawed.
18.
In 1939, Max Newman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
19.
Max Newman's father was Jewish, which was of particular concern in the face of Nazi Germany, and Lyn, Edward and William were evacuated to America in July 1940, where they spent three years before returning to England in October 1943.
20.
Max Newman was cautious, concerned to ensure that the work would be sufficiently interesting and useful, and there was the possibility that his father's German nationality would rule out any involvement in top-secret work.
21.
Max Newman was assigned to the Research Section and set to work on a German teleprinter cipher known as "Tunny".
22.
Max Newman enjoyed the company but disliked the work and found that it was not suited to his talents.
23.
Max Newman persuaded his superiors that Tutte's method could be mechanised, and he was assigned to develop a suitable machine in December 1942.
24.
In September 1945, Max Newman was appointed head of the Mathematics Department and to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester.
25.
Max Newman lost no time in establishing the renowned Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University.
26.
Max Newman explained the whole business of how a computer works to us.
27.
Max Newman retired in 1964 to live in Comberton, near Cambridge.
28.
Max Newman continued to do research on combinatorial topology during a period when England was a major centre of activity notably Cambridge under the leadership of Christopher Zeeman.
29.
Max Newman made important contributions leading to an invitation to present his work at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm at the age of 65, and proved a Generalized Poincare conjecture for topological manifolds in 1966.
30.
At the age of 85, Max Newman began to suffer from Alzheimer's disease.
31.
The Max Newman Building at Manchester was named in his honour.
32.
In 1946, Max Newman declined the offer of an OBE as he considered the offer derisory.
33.
Alan Turing had been appointed an OBE six months earlier and Max Newman felt that it was inadequate recognition of Turing's contribution to winning the war, referring to it as the "ludicrous treatment of Turing".