Professor Jack Copeland

Jack Copeland FRS NZ is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he is Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. In 2012 he was Royden B. Davis Visiting Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His books include The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press), Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press), Alan Turing's Electronic Brain (Oxford University Press), Logic and Reality (Oxford University Press), and Artificial Intelligence (Blackwell); and he has published more than 100 articles on the philosophy and history of computing, and mathematical and philosophical logic. He is recognised as a leading authority on Turing's work, and in June of 2004, the 50th anniversary of Turing's death, he delivered the first annual Turing Memorial Lecture at Bletchley Park National Museum and lectured on Turing's life and work at the Royal Institution of London. He received the Scientific American Sci/Tech Web Award for his on-line archive www.AlanTuring.net. A Londoner by birth, he earned a B.Phil. with Distinction from the University of Oxford followed by a D.Phil. in mathematical logic. At Oxford he was taught by Turing's student and friend Robin Gandy. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles, a visiting professor at the universities of Sydney, Aarhus, Melbourne, and Portsmouth, and a senior fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a past president of the U.S.-based Society for Machines and Mentality and is the founding editor of the Rutherford Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His latest book, a highly accessible biography of Turing entitled Turing Pioneer of the Information Age, published with Oxford University Press in 2012.