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BA (Magdalene) 1853

Son of Lyn and Max Newman.

Mathematician. Max Newman was the son of a German, Herman Alexander Neumann, and kept the family name until 1916. In 1915 he entered St John's College, though his studies were interrupted by War work between 1916 and 1919. He graduated in 1921, and became a Fellow of St John's in 1923. From 1927 he was also a University Lecturer in Mathematics.

His mathematical work was in the field of combinatorial topology where he greatly influenced his friend Henry Whitehead. A series of papers by Newman on this topic between 1926 and 1932 revolutionised the field. Newman also wrote an important paper on theoretical computer science, produced a topological counter-example of major significance in collaboration with Henry Whitehead, and wrote an outstanding paper on periodic transformations in abelian topological groups. He only wrote one book, 'Elements of the topology of plane sets of points', published in 1939.

In 1942 Newman joined the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. Working with Alan Turing, Newman was involved in designing and building electronic machines to break an important German cipher system, culminating in the 'Colossus' which many consider to be the first electronic digital computer.

Between 1945 and 1964 Newman was Fielden Professor of Mathematics at Manchester University. He continued to be involved with mathematics in his retirement, teaching a course at the University of Warwick and undertaking research.

In 1939 Newman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, receiving the Sylvester medal in 1958. In 1962 he was awarded the de Morgan Medal by the London Mathematical Society and in 1973 was made an Honorary Fellow of St John's College.

Newman married the author Lyn Irvine in 1934, and the couple had two sons. Lyn Newman died in 1973, and later that year Max married Margaret Penrose, widow of the geneticist Prof. Lionel Sharples Penrose.

Lilian Lloyd Irvine was the daughter of John A. Irvine, a Presbyterian minister, first in Berwick-upon-Tweed and then in Aberdeen. She attended the Albyn Place School for Girls, and then studied at the University of Aberdeen. In 1924, Lyn joined Girton College, Cambridge, where she was supervised by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Lyn left Cambridge in 1927 with a letter of introduction to Leonard Woolf, who got her a job reviewing fiction for the 'New Statesman', and later, commissioned and published her first book, 'Ten Letter Writers'. Through the Woolfs, she met and started corresponding with other members of the Bloomsbury group, in particular Lady Antoinette Esher. During this period she also edited her own literary journal, 'The Monologue'. This early career as a journalist was curtailed in 1934 by marriage to Max Newman, Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. For the next twenty years Lyn's gift for writing found an outlet in her correspondence to friends and family, as she tried to make a home for Max and their two sons, Edward and William, wherever she found herself. In 1937, she followed Max to Princeton, where he was invited to spend six months. She was back in America in 1940, as an evacuee, with her two young boys. There she campaigned for British mothers to be given financial support in order to return home. In 1943, she lived near Bletchley Park, where Max was employed during the War. The Newmans returned to Cross Farm, Comberton, in 1944, and Lyn hoped finally to settle, but in 1945 Max's career took the family to Manchester. Only in the 1950's did Lyn return to her literary career, which was still regularly interrupted by the demands of her family. In 1957, Faber published her second book, a memoir of her early years in Berwick-upon-Tweed and Aberdeen, entitled 'So much love, so little money'. Her third book, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1960, was inspired by the geese that she kept at Cross Farm. Lyn wrote from a converted Dove House on the farm, which later became the base for her publishing label 'Monologue Books', set up in order to publish her fourth and final book 'Alison Cairns and her family'. Lyn's published works do not represent the total sum of her researches and writing. She wrote, among other things, poetry, an unpublished novel (no longer extant), and children's stories, and carried out research for a life of Fanny Kemble. Her papers include a large and varied correspondence, notes, writings (published and unpublished), diaries, and photographs.

Writers Against Experiments on Animals.

Fellow of St John's 1703-28, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge 1727-65, and Master of St John's 1735-65.