While Grand Text Auto’s entry on Strachey (and Turing) says that “the publication, in 1937, of Alan Turing�s �On Computable Numbers�” wasn’t it published in 1936?
AND
Why isn’t Turing a Modernist?
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Turing’s paper was presented at the conference of the London Mathematical Society in November of 1936. It was subsequently published as conference proceedings by the society in January of 1937. An errata was then published in the next issue.
And, as far as I know, he isn’t a modernist because he didn’t hang out with Hemingway in Paris. That is the defining characteristic, isn’t it?
You could try to argue that he was, I suppose. Most of the discussions of Modernism I’ve read tend to present early thinkers and a later group working through the implications of their work. By analogy, as Darwin, Freud, or Marx were to modernist culture of the 1920s-40s, so Turing was to postmodernity and the information revolution of the 1960s-80s…
You might argue that the Turing machine is conceptually closest to the high modernist music, esp. serialism.
Thanks for the link. It’s interesting too that quite a few Modernists (especially the avant-garde) work towards this relationship to words as if they were “transcendent” in meaning and aesthetics like the musicial note. In other words, in music, the note is the sound, there is less of a distance (or maybe none) between signifier and signified.