Dear Colleagues, We are delighted to announce that Andrew Hodges will give this year's LMS/BCS-FACS Seminar on Thursday, 12 November 2026, with a talk titled "Alan Turing, The Absent Father of Computing". The seminar also marks an anniversary: Turing's "On Computable Numbers" paper was read to the London Mathematical Society on 12 November 1936, ninety years to the day. The seminar will be held in a hybrid format, with the opportunity to attend in person at De Morgan House in London or remotely via Zoom. Date: Thursday, 12 November 2026 Time: 16:30-17:30 GMT (welcome and refreshments from 16:00; reception from 17:30) Venue: De Morgan House, London, and online via Zoom Registration: Attendance is free, but advance registration is required. Please register for either in-person or online attendance via the event page: https://www.lms.ac.uk/events/lms-bcs-facs-seminar-2026 Speaker: Andrew Hodges (University of Oxford) Title: Alan Turing, The Absent Father of Computing Abstract: Alan Turing (1912-1954) has often been dubbed the 'Father' of computing, this vague word conveying the complex connection between On Computable Numbers in 1936, the digital computing plans of 1945, the first working electronic computers in 1948-51, and computer science thereafter. I will address this complexity, starting with an update on the well-known question of whether and how von Neumann’s EDVAC report of 1945 was related to Turing’s work. But my emphasis will be on what happened after 1945, regarding it as a puzzle that Turing drew so little attention to his own 1936 foundations, despite their relevance to his famous Intelligent Machinery predictions. His extraordinary reticence affected the emergent science and technology of computing, as I will illustrate with some little-known documents. My conclusion is summarised in the title: it is fair to consider him a ‘father’, but he avoided taking either praise or responsibility for his offspring. About the speaker: Andrew Hodges was for many years a tutor and lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University. His research was mainly as a colleague of Roger Penrose in making a new approach to mathematical physics, and in this field he was also a visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, working with Nima Arkani-Hamed. He is now an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He is best known as the author of Alan Turing: the Enigma, published in 1983. In the forty years since then he has contributed further to the world of Turing studies, with a website at turing.org.uk. In an unusual career he has also seen various adaptations of this work in the arts and media, most recently in collaborating with the Pet Shop Boys in A man from the future, a musical piece released in October 2026. We hope you will be able to join us, either in London or online. Please feel free to circulate this announcement to colleagues, students, and anyone else who may be interested. Best wishes, Andrei (on behalf of the LMS/BCS-FACS Seminar organisers)