Previously Lost Scientific Papers by Alan Turing Sell for Record £465,000 at Auction

A valuable cache of scientific papers by Alan Turing, the renowned codebreaker and computing pioneer, has been sold at auction for £465,400—over three times its estimated value. Discovered during a house clearance in Bermondsey, south London, the documents were nearly shredded before their historical importance was recognized. The papers had been gifted by Turing’s mother to mathematician Norman Routledge, a close friend of Turing. Among the highlights was a signed copy of Turing’s 1938 PhD dissertation, ‘Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals’, which fetched £110,500. Also included was his seminal 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’, introducing the concept of a universal computing machine, which sold for £208,000. The collection, known as offprints, was printed in limited numbers for academic circulation and is extremely rare. Auctioneers at Hansons hailed the sale as historic, with director Jim Spencer describing the discovery as foundational to modern digital computing. Turing, whose work at Bletchley Park helped break the German Enigma code during WWII, is widely regarded as the father of computer science. The auction represents a significant moment in preserving his intellectual legacy and highlights ongoing public interest in his life and work.