Alan Turing's seminal papers, almost destroyed by a shredder, head to auction

On the left, a picture of old documents written by Alan Turing. On the right, a black and white portrait of Turing.

A trove of Alan Turing's papers, including his own personal copy of his PhD dissertation, is going up for auction June 17 after narrowly avoiding destruction.

The papers were "offprints," or copies of papers distributed in small batches within academia. They include not only Turing's signed dissertation, but also 1937's "On Computable Numbers," considered the first computer programming manual, and 1952's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," Turing's last major published work.