The National Museum of Computing and the London Mathematical Society present a prestigious programme of talks by internationally-renowned thinkers in fields inspired by Alan Turing's 1936 paper. On this page, you will find details of:

• The conference programme

• The public lecture

• The speakers 

• The venue

• The key dates

• The portal for Early Career Researcher bursary applications

• Arrangements for Registration

As further information becomes available, more details will be added from time to time. Keep an eye open for updates.

This is the expected programme as of July 2026.

Professor Avi Wigderson - Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

We are delighted to announce that Professor Avi Widgerson has agreed to present a public lecture on Thursday 17 September 2026, aimed at a more general audience. His topic will be Reading Alan Turing.

Synopsis: Turing did not write much, but his papers were a marvel of eloquence, and reveal his remarkable breadth of interests. More importantly, they contain prescient, revolutionary ideas which literally changed the world, several times over. In this talk I will describe some of these ideas and their impact.

Professor Verónica Becher - Universidad de Buenos Aires

Verónica Becher is a full professor in the School of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a Principal Researcher at Argentina’s National Research Council (CONICET). She earned her undergraduate degree and PhD in Computer Science at UBA, with a Master of Science from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in between.

She founded and directs the KAPOW! Research Group at UBA, leads a team in the SINFIN International Research Program (Université Paris Cité-CNRS / UBA-CONICET), and has been a regular invited researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale (IRIF), Université Paris Cité & CNRS, since 2002.

Her research lies in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, particularly combinatorics on words, algorithmic randomness, and uniform distribution modulo one. She is a specialist on normal numbers — real numbers whose digits contain every finite pattern of equal length with the same asymptotic frequency. She designed polynomial-time algorithms for computing normal numbers and constructed normal numbers with additional mathematical properties. One of her early contributions was the reconstruction of a long-lost Turing manuscript, found tucked behind the galley proofs of his 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers," containing an exponential-time algorithm for computing normal numbers.

Professor Rod Downey - Victoria University of Wellington

Professor Rod Downey is based in Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. He works in computational complexity and mathematical logic, particularly the theory of computation. With Mike Fellows, he is known for founding the area of parameterized complexity, and he is known for his work calibrating the computational aspects of algebra, analysis and algorithmic randomness. These are all areas whose roots go back to Turings seminal 1936 paper, so we see repercussions today. This direct line can be seen in Downeys edited volume Turings Legacy. Downey has published some 300 research papers, 7 monographs and edits 8 journals. He has won many prizes for his work including a Rutherford Prize, a Humboldt Research Prize, Barry Cooper Prize and most recently a Kalman Best Paper Prize. He has given an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians, is New Zealand’s only Fellow of the ACM, and is a Fellow of several other academies including the AMS, and the New Zealand Royal Society.

Professor Juliet Floyd - Boston University

Juliet Floyd is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University and director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities (https://www.bu.edu/humanities/). Her research spans the history and development of 20th century analytic and American philosophy and logic, ordinary language philosophy, and philosophies of computational and emerging media. She has published two volumes on Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein on Mathematics, Cambridge, 2021, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Hardy’s Course of Pure Mathematics (with Felix Mühlhölzer, 2020), over one hundred articles on many philosophers from Kant to the present day, and co-edited the volumes Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy (with S. Shieh, Oxford 2001), Philosophy of Emerging Media (with James E. Katz, Oxford, 2016), Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing (with A. Bokulich, Springer, 2017), Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technologies (with James E. Katz and Katie Schiepers, Springer, 2021), Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? at Fifty (with Greg Chase and Sandra Laugier, Cambridge, 2022) and Nudging Choices Through Media – Ethical and Philosophical Implications for Humanity (with James E. Katz and Katie Schiepers, Springer, 2023).

Professor Julia Knight - University of Notre Dame

Knight’s thesis advisor was Robert L. Vaught, and she started out in model theory. She was interested in infinitary logic and models of arithmetic Carl Jockusch asked some questions that caught her interest, and she began working in computable structure theory, finding connections between recursion theoretic complexity and definability. Most of her research, and that of her 19 PhD students, is in this area. Currently, she is working on Scott complexity, finding optimal infinitary descriptions, of mathematically interesting structures such as the Farey graph GF. She also works on comparing classification problems for different classes of structures, using the notion of Borel embedding, introduced by Friedman and Stanley, and related effective notions.. Turing machines and interactive (oracle) machines, as described in the paper of Alan Turing that is the subject of this meeting, are central to everything she does.

Professor Michael Rathjen - University of Leeds

Michael Rathjen was a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Leeds. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 and Habilitation in 1992 from the University of Münster. After teaching at the Ohio State University in Columbus (1991–1993), he became a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Science Foundation. In 1996 he joined the Mathematics Department of the University of Leeds. From 2002 till 2006 he was a Professor of Mathematics at the Ohio State University. His research interests include proof theory (especially ordinal analysis of impredicative theories), higher type computability, theories of truth, type theory,  constructive and intuitionistic set theories, alternative set theories, and the philosophy of mathematics.

Professor Avi Wigderson - Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Avi Wigderson is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). He earned his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion in 1980, followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1983. After completing postdoctoral positions at UC Berkeley, IBM Research, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), he joined the Computer Science Department at the Hebrew University in 1986. In 1999, Wigderson became a faculty member at IAS, where he also founded the Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics program. His research spans a wide range of areas, including computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, combinatorics, and graph theory, as well as connections between theoretical computer science, mathematics, and other scientific fields. Wigderson's influential work has earned him numerous honours, including the 2021 Abel Prize (shared with László Lovász) and the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award, recognizing both his foundational contributions to the theory of computation, and his decades of intellectual leadership in the field.

Dr. Alexandra Shlapentokh

I was born in 1960 in Kiev, USSR.  In 1979 my family came to the US.   I went to University of Pennsylvania as an undergrad, 1979-83 and to NYU, Courant Institute for my Ph.D. in Math, 1983-88.  Since 1992 I have been at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.  My Ph.D. advisor Harold Shapiro wanted me to show that H10 was undecidable for rings of integers of number fields.  It is nice to know that my thesis problem is finally solved (not by me).

I am married to Phil Rothman who also teaches at ECU but in the Econ Department.  I have two kids: Yakov Shlapentokh-Rothman, an Assistant Professor in Math at University of Toronto and Michal Shlapentokh-Rothman who is finishing her Ph.D. in CS in Urbana-Champaign.  

Dermot Turing is a writer on historical subjects associated with Codebreaking in World War II, having spent the majority of his career in the legal profession. He is a trustee of The National Museum of Computing and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.

Professor Mark Chaplain holds the Gregory Chair in Applied Mathematics at the University of St Andrews. His main area and current focus of research is mathematical oncology - applying mathematics to the study of cancer - a field which he has pioneered since the early 1990s. He has developed a number of important predictive mathematical models for the growth, spread and treatment of cancer, using both systems of nonlinear partial differential equations and agent-based models. He is the current President of the London Mathematical Society.

Prof. Andrew Brooks - University of Bristol

Sir Dermot Turing - TNMOC

Dr Jonathan Pila - University of Oxford

PANEL MODERATOR

Dr Paul Shafer

PANEL MODERATOR

Sir Dermot Turing

Prof Juliet Floyd

Dr Andrew Hodges

Dr Elizabetta Mori

Dr Mark Priestley

Dr Colin Williams