Alan Turing: The Enigma | Andrew Hodges

Alan Turing: The Enigma | Andrew Hodges | Good biography, perhaps too long.

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Alan Turing: The E...

	Alan Turing: The Enigma Andrew Hodges Walker & Company, 2000 - 608 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Alan Turing (1912-54) was a British mathematician who made history. His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic. But Turing's vision went far beyond the desperate wartime struggle. Already in the 1930s he had defined the concept of the universal machine, which underpins the computer revolution. In 1945 he was a pioneer of electronic computer design. But Turing's true goal was the scientific understanding of the mind, brought out in the drama and wit of the famous "Turing test" for machine intelligence and in his prophecy for the twenty-first century. Drawn in to the cockpit of world events and the forefront of technological innovation, Alan Turing was also an innocent and unpretentious gay man trying to live in a society that criminalized him. In 1952 he revealed his homosexuality and was forced to participate in a humiliating treatment program, and was ever after regarded as a security risk. His suicide in 1954 remains one of the many enigmas in an astonishing life story.

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Essential.

The one and only Turing biography you'll ever need, long enough to satisfy even the most hardcore Turing admirers. Irreproachably researched and thorough. I only wish Hodges offered an abridged version I could recommend to my friends- this book is too detailed for casual readers.

Good biography, perhaps too long.

If you consider to read this book in order to know about Alan Turing's life, definetely this is the book. In it you will learn about the code breakers, about the WWII spy technology and also about the science aplied to War, however, when I read it I found out that sometimes too many pages (550) can make it boring (more than 20 pages dedicate about how to build a subroutine in a program, more than 20 pages about homosexuality laws, more than 20 pages about historic information from India). Being so detailed makes sometimes forget about the main issue. That is why I didn't give it 5 stars.

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A scientifically useful biography

I read part of this book in 1985 while trying to understand chaotic orbits. The problem was to understand how an orbit can be deterministic and apparently random. When I read Hodges' description of the Turing machine then I realized that it is easy to answer the question, and was able to write down the answer: one simply digitizes the map or ode, initial condition, and all the control parameters in some base of arithmetic, and then studies the action of a (digitized) positive Liapunov exponent on a digit string. I can't comment on the rest of the book, but Hodges does a very good job of presenting Turing's ideas of computable numbers and computable functions. When my collaborator Palmore read the description I refer to here, he said that he nearly fell out of his chair. We solved the problem of computability of chaotic orbits in that era together.

Is there a good book on computability and automata? So far, all the automata texts that I'm aware of are written in a special holy language of abstract computerize. The language erects an unnecessary barrier to understanding the basic ideas. Is Turing's original paper a proof, or an explanation of what he'd understood? I don't know, but I can refer the reader to "Descartes' Dream" by Reuben and Hersch for perespective.

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interesting portrait of a compelling misfit

The book is well titled as the real Alan Turing was an enigma to many of those who knew him and perhaps even to himself. It is another example of how genius moves to its own rhythms and manages to get noticed in spite of itself.
Turing is, more than anyone else, the father of the modern computer, a man who could visualize something which did not even exist. It was his vision that eventually came to be the most powerful innovation in the last half century. Hodges book explores Turing's entire life and illuminates the context in which apparently arcane and irregular thinking came to have profound ramifications at the right moment and time.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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