[2] He studied first mathematics, then Greats (Greek, Latin, Philosophy and Ancient History), obtaining first class honours in both.

For 36 years, until his 1996 retirement, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford, and he remained an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy.

[3] Lucas is perhaps best known for his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," arguing that an automaton cannot represent a human mathematician, attempting to refute computationalism.

Lucas (1961) began a lengthy and heated debate over the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems for the anthropic mechanism thesis, by arguing that:[5] His argument was strengthened by the discovery by Hava Siegelmann in the 1990s that sufficiently complex analogue recurrent neural networks are more powerful than Turing Machines.

"We are by our own decisions in the face of other men's actions and chance circumstances weaving the web of history on the loom of natural necessity"[9]