Alan Turing's notebook comes to Hong Kong ahead of US$1 million Bonhams auction

A rare book filled with handwritten notes by British mathematician Alan Turing, dubbed the father of modern computing, went on display in Hong Kong on Thursday ahead of a New York auction next month where it is expected to fetch more than US$1 million.

The notebook features 56 pages of Turing's thoughts on the foundations of mathematical notation and computer science, and potential buyers in Hong Kong were the first outside the US to see the papers ahead of the sale by Bonhams on April 13.

The notes date to 1942, when Turing worked at Britain's Bletchley Park code-breaking centre. Turing's time at Bletchley Park, where he helped crack Germany's "unbreakable" Enigma code, was the focus of the recent Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game, in which Hollywood star Benedict Cumberbatch played the mathematician.

While the notes are mainly theoretical, the observations also offer a rare glimpse into the mind of a genius, said Cassandra Hatton, director of Bonhams' history of science department, who spent a year studying them.

"Its mathematical content gives an extraordinary insight into the working mind of one of the greatest luminaries of the 20th century," she said, adding that Turing would dub theories "hateful" or "inconvenient".

On one page, Turing writes: "The Leibniz notation I find extremely difficult to understand in spite of it having been the one I understood the best once! It certainly implies that some relation between x and y has been laid down eg, y=x2+3x..."