The Turing Guide

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS | 479


and Beyond (with Jack Copeland and Carl Posy, 2013) and a special volume on the history of modern
computing (with Copeland, Posy, and Parker Bright, The Rutherford Journal, 2010).
Edward Simpson, CB, joined Bletchley Park’s Naval Section in 1942, at age 19 as a mathematics graduate
of Queen’s University, Belfast, and led the Japanese Naval JN25 cryptanalytic team. In 1947 he married
Rebecca Gibson, a cryptanalyst in the JN25 team. After the war he pursued mathematical statistics at
Cambridge under Maurice Bartlett, where his name became joined (not by him) in Simpson’s paradox,
Simpson’s drift, and Simpson’s diversity index. From 1947 he was an administrative class civil servant
in education, the Treasury, and elsewhere, and was a Commonwealth Fund Fellow in the United States
from 1956 to 1957. He retired in 1982 as Deputy Secretary and was appointed a Companion of the
Order of the Bath.


Mark Sprevak is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His primary research
interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, with particular focus on
the cognitive sciences. He has published articles in, among other places, The Journal of Philosophy, The
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, and Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science.


Doron Swade, MBE, is an engineer, historian, and museum professional, and a leading authority on the
life and work of Charles Babbage. He was formerly Assistant Director and Head of Collections at the
Science Museum, and before that Curator of Computing. He has published widely on the history of
computing, Babbage, and curatorship. He studied physics, mathematics, electronics, control engineer-
ing, machine intelligence, philosophy of science, and history at various universities, including the
University of Cape Town, the University of Cambridge, and University College London, where he
received his PhD degree. He was awarded an MBE in 2009 for Services to the History of Computing.
He is currently researching Babbage’s mechanical notation at Royal Holloway University of London.
Sir John Dermot Turing is the nephew of Alan Turing. After following in Alan’s footsteps at Sherborne
School and King’s College Cambridge, he did a research degree in genetics at Oxford University before
going into the law. He is now a partner at Clifford Chance, specializing in financial sector issues includ-
ing regulation, failed banks, and risk management. He became a trustee of Bletchley Park in 2012 and,
as a complement to an inescapable interest in naval history and cryptanalysis, enjoys opera, cooking,
mountains, and gardening.


Jean Valentine was an operator of the bombe decryption device at Bletchley Park during the Second
World War. She was a member of the ‘Wrens’ (Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS). Along with her
co-workers, she remained quiet about her war work until the mid-1970s. More recently she has been
involved with the reconstruction of the bombe at Bletchley Park Museum, giving demonstrations to
the public.


Robin Whitty has a BSc in mathematics and a PhD in software engineering. He has lectured in
computer science at Goldsmiths and at London South Bank University, and is currently with the
School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests are in
combinatorics and combinatorial optimization. He is creator of the award-winning website http://www.
theoremoftheday.org.
Robin Wilson is an Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, Emeritus Professor
of Geometry at Gresham College, London, and a former Fellow of Keble College, Oxford University.
After graduating from Oxford, he received his PhD degree in number theory from the University of
Pennsylvania. He has written and co-edited over forty books on graph theory and the history of math-
ematics, including Four Colors Suffice and Combinatorics: Ancient & Modern. His historical research
interests include British mathematics and the history of graph theory and combinatorics, and he was
President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics from 2012 to 2014. An enthusiastic

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