It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades–all before his suicide at age forty-one. This classic biography of the founder of computer science, reissued on the centenary of his birth with a substantial new preface by the author, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. A gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution, Andrew Hodges’s acclaimed book captures both the inner and outer drama of Turing’s life.
Hodges tells how Turing’s revolutionary idea of 1936–the concept of a universal machine–laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing’s leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic story of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program–all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime.
Book Info:
In 1946 Alan Turing made his first reference to machine intelligence in connection with chess-playing. In 1947, Alan Turing specified the first chess program for chess.,Beyond any doubt, the most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turings invention of the notion of mechanical rationality.,Queen Elizabeth II granted a rare “mercy pardon” Monday to Alan Turing, the computing and mathematics pioneer whose chemical castration for being gay drove him to ,April 2-5, 2012: 28th British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science (BCTCS 2012), University of Manchester. Part of the Alan Turing Year, and collocated with ,1. Outline of Life. Alan Turing’s short and extraordinary life has attracted wide interest. It has inspired his mother’s memoir (E. S. Turing 1959), a ,Other websites [change | edit source] Jack Copeland 2012. Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved ‘millions of lives’. BBC News / Technology ,It is fitting that the greatest code-breaker of World War Two remains a riddle a hundred years after his birth. Alan Turing, the brilliant, maverick mathematician ,Alan Turing, right, with colleagues working on the Ferranti Mark I computer. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images,Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He was highly influential in the development ,The book first appeared in October/November 1983 as. UK hardback edition: Alan Turing: the Enigma, Burnett Books with Hutchinson. US hardback edition: Alan Turing
* Books Details:
- Sales Rank: #71098 in Books
- Published on: 2012-05-27
- Original language:
English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.60″ h x
5.00″ w x
7.70″ l,
1.30 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 632 pages
Alan Turing: the Enigma (Andrew Hodges)
The book first appeared in October/November 1983 as. UK hardback edition: Alan Turing: the Enigma, Burnett Books with Hutchinson. US hardback edition: Alan Turing
Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He was highly influential in the development
Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing receives royal pardon
Alan Turing, right, with colleagues working on the Ferranti Mark I computer. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images
Alan Turing and his machines – fresh insights into the enigma
It is fitting that the greatest code-breaker of World War Two remains a riddle a hundred years after his birth. Alan Turing, the brilliant, maverick mathematician
Alan Turing – Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Other websites [change | edit source] Jack Copeland 2012. Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved ‘millions of lives’. BBC News / Technology
Alan Turing (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
1. Outline of Life. Alan Turing’s short and extraordinary life has attracted wide interest. It has inspired his mother’s memoir (E. S. Turing 1959), a
The Alan Turing Year – ATY EVENTS OVERVIEW
April 2-5, 2012: 28th British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science (BCTCS 2012), University of Manchester. Part of the Alan Turing Year, and collocated with
Queen pardons computing giant Alan Turing 59 years after
Queen Elizabeth II granted a rare “mercy pardon” Monday to Alan Turing, the computing and mathematics pioneer whose chemical castration for being gay drove him to
Alan Turing – Wikiquote
Beyond any doubt, the most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turings invention of the notion of mechanical rationality.
chessprogramming – Alan Turing – Wikispaces
In 1946 Alan Turing made his first reference to machine intelligence in connection with chess-playing. In 1947, Alan Turing specified the first chess program for chess.
- Sales Rank: #71098 in Books
- Published on: 2012-05-27
- Original language:
English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.60″ h x
5.00″ w x
7.70″ l,
1.30 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 632 pages
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades–all before his suicide at age forty-one. This classic biography of the founder of computer science, reissued on the centenary of his birth with a substantial new preface by the author, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. A gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution, Andrew Hodges’s acclaimed book captures both the inner and outer drama of Turing’s life.
Hodges tells how Turing’s revolutionary idea of 1936–the concept of a universal machine–laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing’s leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic story of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program–all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
143 of 145 people found the following review helpful.
One of the few books on my ‘keep forever’ list
By Thomas D. Jennings
Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a ‘pure’ mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).His best-known work is his 1936 ‘Computable Numbers’ paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England’s WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world’s first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.Computers were always symbol-manipulators to Alan, not ‘number crunchers’, the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60′s and 70′s. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he umm wasn’t exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until ‘rediscovered’ decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His ‘Turing test’ of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and “go along” with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn’t acknowledge some of his life’s work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, “we didn’t know he was a homosexual until after the war… if the security people had found out [and removed him]… we might have lost the war”. This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing’s life.My only complaint with the book is that it makes a number of assumptions or implications that seem to require knowledge of British culture, both contemporary and of the period, which I still didn’t pick up on a re-reading. But it barely detracts from the book.Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I’ve ever read.
57 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
The Classic Biography of the Computer’s Progenitor
By Martin D. Davis
It is a pleasure to see that the wonderful biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges is once again available. With loving care, Hodges follows Turing’s life from the clumsy child whose largely absentee parents were caught up in maintaining the British imperial presence in India, to the mathematically precocious adolescent facing teachers for whom mathematics imparted a bad smell to a room, finally coming into his own at Cambridge University where he wrote the paper that provided the conceptual underpinnings of the all-purpose computers we all use today. Hodges carefully explains Turing’s crucial contributions to breaking the secret codes that the German military used all through the Second World War, confident in the security provided by their “Enigma” machines. Turing’s highly successful war-time practical work known only to a few, his efforts after the war to enable the construction of a general purpose electronic computer were frustrated by bureaucratic mismanagement and by a lack of appreciation of the value of his ideas, many of which came to the fore much later. A burglary of his house that a prudent man would have kept to himself, led to Turing’s homosexuality coming to official notice when he reported the crime to the police. He was prosecuted for “gross indecency” and sentenced to a course of injections of estrogen intended to diminish his sex drive. We will never know how much this barbaric treatment contributed to his suicide or what he might have accomplished had his life not been cut short. This is a book that will fascinate readers interested in the history of the computer, in the story of how the German submarine fleet threatening to strangle England was defeated, and in the tragic story of the persecution for his sex life of a man who should have been prized as a national hero.
52 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
One of the most important books I’ve ever read
By Thomas D. Jennings
Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a ‘pure’ mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).His best-known work is his 1936 ‘Computable Numbers’ paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England’s WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world’s first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.Computers were always symbol-manipulators, to Alan, not ‘number crunchers’, the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60′s and 70′s. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he wasn’t exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until ‘rediscovered’ decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His ‘Turing test’ of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and “go along” with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn’t acknowledge some of his life’s work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, “we didn’t know he was a homosexual until after the war… if the security people had found out [and removed him]… we might have lost the war”. This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing’s life. Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I’ve ever read.
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