Which university awarded Alan Turing his PhD in 1938?

Princeton University awarded Alan Turing his PhD in 1938.

Turing earned the doctorate from Princeton’s Department of Mathematics in June 1938. He had arrived at the university in 1936 and worked under Alonzo Church, a leading figure in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. Turing also spent part of this period as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow.

His doctoral dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, developed the idea of ordinal logic and explored relative computing. In this work, Turing considered machines equipped with abstract “oracles,” a concept that remains important in computability theory.

Turing had previously studied mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, and Cambridge is therefore a frequent source of confusion. Cambridge shaped his early career, but it did not award this PhD. He returned to Britain after Princeton and later applied his mathematical and logical expertise to wartime cryptanalysis.