Courtesy University of Canterbury
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. This year he is Royden B. Davis Visiting Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He is the author of Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, which will be published by Oxford University Press in November. His other 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 recognized as a leading authority on Turing's work, and in June of 2004, the fiftieth 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. In June 2012 he hosted the event Alan Turing's 100th Birthday Party at King's College Cambridge, a two-day celebration of Turing's life and work opened by Sir John Turing. 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 research fellow at Georgetown University, 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.
