A trove of pioneering work by Alan Turing that was found in a loft and almost shredded today sold for nearly half a million pounds.
The so-called Alan Turing Papers are the origins of computer science by the late genius mathematician and were discovered in the attic of a fellow mathematician who was given them by Turing's mother after her son's death in 1954.
The work, which was bought at auction for £465,500, was rediscovered by the relatives of Norman Routledge when they were having a clear out.
The collection included the wartime code breaker's personal signed copy of his 1938 PhD dissertation, 'Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals' - it sold for £110,500 at auction today.
His paper 'On Computable Numbers' also known as 'Turing's Proof' which introduced the world to the idea of a universal computing machine in 1936, sold for £208,000.
