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.

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

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

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.

Conference Co-Chair

Scientific Advisory Committee Chair

Panel 1

(Details to follow)

Panel 2

(Details to follow)