Book description
A new edition to celebrate Alan Turing's centenary, includes a new
foreword by the author and a preface by Douglas Hofstadter.
Alan Turing was the extraordinary Cambridge mathematician who
masterminded the cracking of the German Enigma ciphers and transformed
the Second World War. But his vision went far beyond this crucial
achievement. Before the war he had formulated the concept of the
universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design
for a digital computer.
Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a
vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality
rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment.
In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing committed suicide and one of Britain's
greatest scientific minds was lost.
A first-rate presentation of the life of a first-rate scientific
mind. it is hard to imagine a more thoughtful and warm biography than
this one -- Douglas Hofstadter New York Times Book Review One of the
finest scientific biographies I've ever read: authoritative, superbly
researched, deeply sympathetic and beautifully told Sylvia Nasar, author
of A Beautiful Mind Andrew Hodge's book is of exemplary scholarship and
sympathy. Intimate, perceptive and insightful, it's also the most
readable biography I've picked up in some time Time Out One of the
finest scientific biographies ever written New Yorker Save your money
for the forthcoming new edition of Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew
Hodges, regarded by many as one of the greatest biographies of anyone,
let along Turing -- Robert Matthews BBC Focus Magazine Andrew Hodges
is Tutor in Mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford University. His
classic text of 1983, since translated into several languages, created a
new kind of biography, with mathematics, science, computing, war
history, philosophy and gay liberation woven into a single personal
narrative. He is an active contributor to the mathematics of fundamental
physics, as a follower of Roger Penrose. See www. turing. org. uk for
further material.
