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Alan Turing: The Enigma
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 du
616 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1983
2,460 people are currently reading
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About the author
Andrew Hodges
17books114followersAndrew Hodges is a British mathematician, author and an activist in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.
Since the early 1970s, Hodges has worked on twistor theory which is the approach to the problems of fundamental physics pioneered by Roger Penrose.
He is a Tutorial Fellow in mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford University.
Since the early 1970s, Hodges has worked on twistor theory which is the approach to the problems of fundamental physics pioneered by Roger Penrose.
He is a Tutorial Fellow in mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,113 reviews
June 7, 2017
Alan Turing 23 June, 1912 - 7 June, 1954
Proximate Cause & Goodness of Fit
I'm not too proud to admit that the impetus for my picking up this biography was a trailer for the upcoming film on Alan Turing and his involvement with cracking the Enigma code during WWII ( ). However, if you are interested exclusively (or even primarily) in the cryptanalytic exploits of Turing et al. at Bletchley Park then this is probably not � repeat not the Turing book for you.
While Andrew Hodges thoroughly covers Turing's activities during the Second World War, this is just one piece of the whole. As one might expect of a book with an introduction by Douglas Hofstadter, it is an examination of both function and form. Alan's experiences were what they were because of who he was, and, in turn, these experiences made him into the man, the enigma he became.
The Young Turing Machine
Andrew Hodges, and Henrik Olesen, the artist behind both depict the young Alan Turing as a child inquisitive, and bright beyond his years. Alan, even in his earliest years, exhibited what Hodges refers to as a "desert island" mentality. If Alan had a problem, he relied on his own ingenuity to find an answer (e.g. inventing a machine to count gear revolutions and make adjustments as needed for his broken bicycle chain).
The young genius mind, however, outside of a vacuum, does not necessarily coalesce easily with the world around it. This was certainly true of Alan's early experiences in the English public school environment.* Alan was what some might refer to as "extremely pick-on-able." Thus, when he received a copy of Edwin Tenney Brewster's Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know on behalf of an unnamed benefactor in 1922, Alan was undoubtedly relieved to be able to escape into a world of science, numbers and natural order. Brewster portrayed the human body as a machine; one with duties, tasks, functions, and, perhaps more importantly, one that could be understood through the faculties of reason.
Obedience to Authority & The Imitation Game
In 1926, at the age of 13, Alan (left, below) was sent to the Sherborne School . With an emphasis good citizenship, and the individual's duty to fit into the system of their small society for the greater good (none of which included becoming a "man of science), Sherborne was not a good fit for Alan.
However, things began to turn around for Alan in 1928, when he met Christopher Morcom. Morcom, one year ahead of Alan at Sherburn and a member of a different "house," shared Alan's passion for science, maths, and exploration of the natural world. Unlike Alan, however, Morcom was able to integrate these interests with scholastic success.
The letters between Alan and Christopher during vacations from Sherborne are filled with an excited energy that comes with having someone with whom to share new discoveries. Christopher was both Alan's mentor and, as portrayed by Hodges, his first love. It's not clear whether this intimacy between the two was physical in nature, but the magnitude of Christopher's place in Alan's heart was made acutely and painfully clear when Christopher died suddenly of bovine tuberculosis in 1930.
The letters between Christopher Morcom's mother and Alan (a correspondence that continued for many years) reflect their shared grief in losing Christopher. The experience changed Alan in many ways, including a renewed dedication to honoring Christopher's memory by pursuing the interests they had shared (which, despite their youth, had included quantum physics, and Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory ).
An Ordinary English Homosexual Atheist Mathematician
Though, unlike Christopher, Alan did not win a scholarship to his first choice, Trinity, he was admitted and matriculated to King's College, Cambridge in 1931. Though Alan remained secluded at King's, he was well-suited to its norms. In addition to the academic caliber of his professors and classmates, it was a socially and politically liberal environment; and it was in this context, that Alan became somewhat matter-of-factly open in his homosexuality.
Not knowing much about Cambridge (or really any university) in the 1940s, I was not clear as to whether Hodges' references to the life of an "ordinary english homosexual..." were made in jest. However, though Hodges is clear that this was not an easy life, it seems that it was much easier in the context of King's College.
Decidability, Computability & the Entscheidungsproblem
It is because of my own descriptive shortcomings that I won't be saying much about the content of the foundational problems (and paradoxes) in math and logic being asked and addressed by Turing and his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s. Suffice it to say that if you're operating under the impression that any system of mathematical logic can be complete, consistent and decidable, you might want to take a gander at some of Kurt Gödel's early work, and Turing's (though some might direct you toward the papers of Alonzo Church ).
Before you say, ‘well who cares?� Let it be known that the very notion of "computability" (in a time when what was meant by "computer" is akin to what we think of as a "writer" - one doing the writing/one doing the computing) was new. Furthermore, this was the point at which Turing made a huge leap in the conceptual connection between abstract symbols and the physical world.
Like Schrödinger's cat, the Universal Turing Machine was a thought experiment, the elegance of which lies in its simplicity. Turing's conception (based on the idea of a typewriter) is that there is a machine that has a tape , which is divided into squares . Each square can bear a symbol. At a any given moment, one square is "in the machine," this is the scanned square, and it bears the scanned symbol.
Doesn't sound like much, I know, but here's the thing: the state of the machine (with its finite table of actions) can be determined by a singly expression using the symbols (which can be limited to two)...and there's recursion. It makes more sense if you read it from the experts!
To Oz and Back
It's the mid-1930s at this point, and Princeton is a pretty happening place. Turing, offered a fellowship there, crossed the pond to work with John von Neumann (who Hodges likens to the Wizard of Oz). Things just didn't work out as planned. Princeton was the height of wealth and aristocratic excess from Turing's point of view, and Turing was proving again the difference between having brilliant ideas and impressing them on the world.
However, Turing did have a good time at Princeton when taking part in "treasure hunts" consisting of series of encrypted clues. So, when Turing turned down a position at Princeton, and went back to Cambridge in 1938, his experiences stateside came in handy.
The Enigma & Bletchley Park
Prior to Britain's declaration of war, Alan Turing was (surprisingly) the first and only mathematician recruited to work at the super secret Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) , and later moved to the cryptanalytic HQ at Bletchley Park . Alan, who had long dreamed of a chess-playing machine, suddenly had a practical problem for his obsession.
And, of course there was decryption of Enigma messages to be done. Alan's ability (and desire) to bridge the gap between mathematics and engineering was, for the first time, seen by others as an asset. Turing's thought experiments were being translated into actual electronic machinery� the Bombe (below), and the Colossus .
To be clear, it was the Bombe that was used to crack the Enigma. However, the Colossus was the first computer that approached Turing's conception of "universality" in that it was programmable . Many of those working at Bletchley were Wrens (seen below with the Colossus), members of the Women's Royal Naval Service. For Turing this was his first contact with women, including Joan Clarke . The two were briefly engaged, but this was broken off in 1941 when Turing informed Clarke of his homosexuality.
The Heart in Exile
Turing had been afforded more freedom during the war than he, perhaps, realized at the time. At the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Turing completed the design for an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), but in the face of bureaucracy and departmental divisiveness, he had almost no control over its engineering and construction.
America was no better (just ask Lou Reed—his parents sent him for electroshock therapy, and that was for bisexuality). Having decided that homosexuals presented a “security risk,� Turing was banned from the United States as a whole.
In a twisted, endless loop, intolerance for homosexuality put any homosexual at risk for blackmail, which, in turn, made homosexuals a security risk, thereby increasing the intolerance with which we began.
On June 8th, 1954 Alan Turing was found dead in his home, lying in his bed. The identified the cause as cyanide poisoning, and the post-mortem inquest easily ruled it a suicide. In his house they found a jar of potassium cyanide, and a jam jar of cyanide solution. Next to his bed was a half-eaten apple.
____________________________________________
* For those of you who, like myself, live west of the Atlantic, "public school" in Britain is pretty much the opposite of what it means here (basically, it's the equivalent of the American private/boarding school...although most of us don't spend 15 years there).
Proximate Cause & Goodness of Fit
I'm not too proud to admit that the impetus for my picking up this biography was a trailer for the upcoming film on Alan Turing and his involvement with cracking the Enigma code during WWII ( ). However, if you are interested exclusively (or even primarily) in the cryptanalytic exploits of Turing et al. at Bletchley Park then this is probably not � repeat not the Turing book for you.
While Andrew Hodges thoroughly covers Turing's activities during the Second World War, this is just one piece of the whole. As one might expect of a book with an introduction by Douglas Hofstadter, it is an examination of both function and form. Alan's experiences were what they were because of who he was, and, in turn, these experiences made him into the man, the enigma he became.
The Young Turing Machine
Andrew Hodges, and Henrik Olesen, the artist behind both depict the young Alan Turing as a child inquisitive, and bright beyond his years. Alan, even in his earliest years, exhibited what Hodges refers to as a "desert island" mentality. If Alan had a problem, he relied on his own ingenuity to find an answer (e.g. inventing a machine to count gear revolutions and make adjustments as needed for his broken bicycle chain).
The young genius mind, however, outside of a vacuum, does not necessarily coalesce easily with the world around it. This was certainly true of Alan's early experiences in the English public school environment.* Alan was what some might refer to as "extremely pick-on-able." Thus, when he received a copy of Edwin Tenney Brewster's Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know on behalf of an unnamed benefactor in 1922, Alan was undoubtedly relieved to be able to escape into a world of science, numbers and natural order. Brewster portrayed the human body as a machine; one with duties, tasks, functions, and, perhaps more importantly, one that could be understood through the faculties of reason.
Obedience to Authority & The Imitation Game
In 1926, at the age of 13, Alan (left, below) was sent to the Sherborne School . With an emphasis good citizenship, and the individual's duty to fit into the system of their small society for the greater good (none of which included becoming a "man of science), Sherborne was not a good fit for Alan.
However, things began to turn around for Alan in 1928, when he met Christopher Morcom. Morcom, one year ahead of Alan at Sherburn and a member of a different "house," shared Alan's passion for science, maths, and exploration of the natural world. Unlike Alan, however, Morcom was able to integrate these interests with scholastic success.
The letters between Alan and Christopher during vacations from Sherborne are filled with an excited energy that comes with having someone with whom to share new discoveries. Christopher was both Alan's mentor and, as portrayed by Hodges, his first love. It's not clear whether this intimacy between the two was physical in nature, but the magnitude of Christopher's place in Alan's heart was made acutely and painfully clear when Christopher died suddenly of bovine tuberculosis in 1930.
The letters between Christopher Morcom's mother and Alan (a correspondence that continued for many years) reflect their shared grief in losing Christopher. The experience changed Alan in many ways, including a renewed dedication to honoring Christopher's memory by pursuing the interests they had shared (which, despite their youth, had included quantum physics, and Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory ).
An Ordinary English Homosexual Atheist Mathematician
Though, unlike Christopher, Alan did not win a scholarship to his first choice, Trinity, he was admitted and matriculated to King's College, Cambridge in 1931. Though Alan remained secluded at King's, he was well-suited to its norms. In addition to the academic caliber of his professors and classmates, it was a socially and politically liberal environment; and it was in this context, that Alan became somewhat matter-of-factly open in his homosexuality.
Not knowing much about Cambridge (or really any university) in the 1940s, I was not clear as to whether Hodges' references to the life of an "ordinary english homosexual..." were made in jest. However, though Hodges is clear that this was not an easy life, it seems that it was much easier in the context of King's College.
Decidability, Computability & the Entscheidungsproblem
It is because of my own descriptive shortcomings that I won't be saying much about the content of the foundational problems (and paradoxes) in math and logic being asked and addressed by Turing and his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s. Suffice it to say that if you're operating under the impression that any system of mathematical logic can be complete, consistent and decidable, you might want to take a gander at some of Kurt Gödel's early work, and Turing's (though some might direct you toward the papers of Alonzo Church ).
Before you say, ‘well who cares?� Let it be known that the very notion of "computability" (in a time when what was meant by "computer" is akin to what we think of as a "writer" - one doing the writing/one doing the computing) was new. Furthermore, this was the point at which Turing made a huge leap in the conceptual connection between abstract symbols and the physical world.
Like Schrödinger's cat, the Universal Turing Machine was a thought experiment, the elegance of which lies in its simplicity. Turing's conception (based on the idea of a typewriter) is that there is a machine that has a tape , which is divided into squares . Each square can bear a symbol. At a any given moment, one square is "in the machine," this is the scanned square, and it bears the scanned symbol.
Doesn't sound like much, I know, but here's the thing: the state of the machine (with its finite table of actions) can be determined by a singly expression using the symbols (which can be limited to two)...and there's recursion. It makes more sense if you read it from the experts!
To Oz and Back
It's the mid-1930s at this point, and Princeton is a pretty happening place. Turing, offered a fellowship there, crossed the pond to work with John von Neumann (who Hodges likens to the Wizard of Oz). Things just didn't work out as planned. Princeton was the height of wealth and aristocratic excess from Turing's point of view, and Turing was proving again the difference between having brilliant ideas and impressing them on the world.
However, Turing did have a good time at Princeton when taking part in "treasure hunts" consisting of series of encrypted clues. So, when Turing turned down a position at Princeton, and went back to Cambridge in 1938, his experiences stateside came in handy.
The Enigma & Bletchley Park
Prior to Britain's declaration of war, Alan Turing was (surprisingly) the first and only mathematician recruited to work at the super secret Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) , and later moved to the cryptanalytic HQ at Bletchley Park . Alan, who had long dreamed of a chess-playing machine, suddenly had a practical problem for his obsession.
“Before the war my work was in logic and my hobby was cryptanalysis, and now it is the other way round.�How so? Well, von Neumann's theory of ‘mԾ� strategies (the application of probabilities to any game between two players such that one chooses the “least bad� option) � one of making decisions in the absence of perfect information, had direct applications in strategic combat.
And, of course there was decryption of Enigma messages to be done. Alan's ability (and desire) to bridge the gap between mathematics and engineering was, for the first time, seen by others as an asset. Turing's thought experiments were being translated into actual electronic machinery� the Bombe (below), and the Colossus .
To be clear, it was the Bombe that was used to crack the Enigma. However, the Colossus was the first computer that approached Turing's conception of "universality" in that it was programmable . Many of those working at Bletchley were Wrens (seen below with the Colossus), members of the Women's Royal Naval Service. For Turing this was his first contact with women, including Joan Clarke . The two were briefly engaged, but this was broken off in 1941 when Turing informed Clarke of his homosexuality.
The Heart in Exile
Turing had been afforded more freedom during the war than he, perhaps, realized at the time. At the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Turing completed the design for an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), but in the face of bureaucracy and departmental divisiveness, he had almost no control over its engineering and construction.
“Alan Turing might be Valiant-for-Truth, but even he had been led into the work of deception by science, and by sex into lying to the police.�Outside of the cloistered world of Cambridge, England was not exactly gay-friendly (didn't Oscar Wilde get hard labor for that?). In "exile" in Manchester, our ordinary English homosexual atheist, when burgled by the friends of a young man he brought home, reported the larceny to the police. However, by engaging in such “sexual perversion,� Turing had placed himself outside of the protection of the law. Turing was sentenced not to prison, but chemical castration by estrogen injections.
America was no better (just ask Lou Reed—his parents sent him for electroshock therapy, and that was for bisexuality). Having decided that homosexuals presented a “security risk,� Turing was banned from the United States as a whole.
In a twisted, endless loop, intolerance for homosexuality put any homosexual at risk for blackmail, which, in turn, made homosexuals a security risk, thereby increasing the intolerance with which we began.
On June 8th, 1954 Alan Turing was found dead in his home, lying in his bed. The identified the cause as cyanide poisoning, and the post-mortem inquest easily ruled it a suicide. In his house they found a jar of potassium cyanide, and a jam jar of cyanide solution. Next to his bed was a half-eaten apple.
____________________________________________
* For those of you who, like myself, live west of the Atlantic, "public school" in Britain is pretty much the opposite of what it means here (basically, it's the equivalent of the American private/boarding school...although most of us don't spend 15 years there).
September 11, 2016
This was a fascinating book. I'm not really recommending it because I thought it was overly complicated and I'm not sure that a lot of people will want to spend half of their reading time on Wikipedia the way I did. I only understood about a quarter of the many, many mathematical concepts that were discussed, at exhausting length, in the book. Still, I'm glad to know more about the man who contributed so much to computer science. He had a fascinating, tragic life. Great book, but be prepared for some headaches.
March 29, 2018
I loved this book. I was almost afraid to read it after others said how difficult it was to understand the math sections, but I found those to be fascinating. If math had been taught this way in my schools, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. I even read some of the maths bits to my husband!
As to Turing's life, I very much enjoyed reading about that, too. I wish I had known him. The way his mind works just took my breath away. I found myself going back over paragraphs, just to make certain I would always remember his ideas, and the way he expressed them.
The book covers his entire life ... birth to death ... not just the code breaking days of WWII. Not only is he considered a pioneer of computer science, and artificial intelligence, but he dabbled in physics, quantum mechanics, biology, chemistry, and neurology, too. In 1952, his work on morphogenesis became a completely new field of mathematical biology.
I can certainly relate to his personality quirks. I seem to have quite a few of the same ones. Nice to know I'm in such good company. Of course, he didn't see them as 'quirks', and neither do I.
As to his death, well, there has always been two schools of thought about what really happened. Either way, it was just tragic to lose his great mind, and honest heart.
The amount of research the author conducted was amazing. He really worked hard to bring so many resources together for our enjoyment. Andrew wrote, "If this book is truly a biography - a writing of life, not a collection of facts - then it is because people have been prepared to allow that interference, and to entrust me with words and ideas that still have living force." (675)
Some may find the math bits too dreary, or feel the book is too long, but I am not one of them. It changed my way of looking at certain things. It touched me on a intellectual level, and an emotional one. As I said, I loved it. If you're not 'into' math, you can skim those parts, and still enjoy the rest of Alan's interesting life.
5 Stars = It made a significant impact on my heart, and/or mind. It moved me. I won't forget it.
As to Turing's life, I very much enjoyed reading about that, too. I wish I had known him. The way his mind works just took my breath away. I found myself going back over paragraphs, just to make certain I would always remember his ideas, and the way he expressed them.
The book covers his entire life ... birth to death ... not just the code breaking days of WWII. Not only is he considered a pioneer of computer science, and artificial intelligence, but he dabbled in physics, quantum mechanics, biology, chemistry, and neurology, too. In 1952, his work on morphogenesis became a completely new field of mathematical biology.
I can certainly relate to his personality quirks. I seem to have quite a few of the same ones. Nice to know I'm in such good company. Of course, he didn't see them as 'quirks', and neither do I.
As to his death, well, there has always been two schools of thought about what really happened. Either way, it was just tragic to lose his great mind, and honest heart.
The amount of research the author conducted was amazing. He really worked hard to bring so many resources together for our enjoyment. Andrew wrote, "If this book is truly a biography - a writing of life, not a collection of facts - then it is because people have been prepared to allow that interference, and to entrust me with words and ideas that still have living force." (675)
Some may find the math bits too dreary, or feel the book is too long, but I am not one of them. It changed my way of looking at certain things. It touched me on a intellectual level, and an emotional one. As I said, I loved it. If you're not 'into' math, you can skim those parts, and still enjoy the rest of Alan's interesting life.
5 Stars = It made a significant impact on my heart, and/or mind. It moved me. I won't forget it.
November 28, 2016
To read this is to feel humbled, not just by Alan Turing’s brilliant mind, but also by the years of dedicated work that Andrew Hodges put into this biography. At 700-plus pages, including a massive number of footnotes and references which are themselves a fund of fascinating information, it is dense going however, and probably not for everyone, although I found it totally absorbing**.
Here finally (well, not really “finally� as it was written in 1983) was someone who could explain Turing’s universal machine and his theory of computable numbers. (Not that I'm sure I understood it, but Hodges� explanations are lucid � unlike Dyson’s muddled and waffly Turing’s Cathedral that I once mistakenly thought was this book.)
Turing was a strange, contradictory character, a shy and bumbling academic but at the same time quite unlike the academic stereotype: as a mathematician, he was so isolated from his peers that he would often formulate “new� theorems unaware that they had already been discovered; but as a result, his methods were idiosyncratic and unconventional, and often led to truly new insights.
His expertise covered a huge range –everything he did had to have some practical application, yet he was the most impractical and disorganized person himself.
His prime fascination was the brain - to make a mechanical model of its logical functions, and the question of whether machines could be made to think. To this end he proposed the criterion of the “imitation game�, where if one could not tell whether responses to questions were from a human or a (hidden) machine, one should consider the machine as behaving like a human. To be capable of “thinking�, however, the machine would also have to learn, independently of its programs, and Turing formulated what he considered appropriate learning schemes.
But here’s the thing � he did not seem to consider the essential need of humans to communicate with each other and interact with their environment as significant to learning and development; “I think of people as pink-coloured sense data�, he said supposedly in jest, but I thought that there was a significant truth there. It all makes me wonder if Turing was not somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Although this is not something that Hodges speculates about, Turing did indeed feel his own life was something of a imitation game.
He was most famous of course for his brilliant work at Bletchley during WW2 in cracking the Enigma codes, and Hodges places him very well at the centre of the decryption effort � but at the same time on the periphery, surprisingly, of the actual development of the Colossus which was the actual precursor of the computer. (This was because computers as such didn’t interest him at all; it was getting them to “think� that was the challenge).
After WW2, he was involved with two projects, one was the paper design for the ACE computer, the other in programming the first actual computer (at Manchester, some time before the more famous ENIAC was completed in the US). His involvement wasn’t exactly peripheral, but he gradually lost interest in it as its limitations became apparent for the cybernetic research he wanted to perform.
Turing was also a homosexual at a time when that was considered an unspeakable depravity and at best an illness. That certainly contributed to the isolation he felt for most of his life, although he wasn’t at all reticent about his orientation either � in that he was a man well before his time. It’s commonly thought that he committed suicide following a conviction for “indecent� activities, but Hodges makes it clear that the two events weren’t connected, as he had put that episode well behind him two years earlier.
What Hodges does very well, in an extended analysis, is place Turing’s death in the context of Britain’s panic over blackmail, homosexuals and spies in the secret services. This was around 1953-4 when the atomic bomb was being developed, and Burgess, McLean and others had defected with both British and US secrets. Hodges doesn’t speculate on whether there was any actual government approach to Turing in that context, but it would have been clear to him that he would have been considered an even greater risk, as during the war he had been privy to the innermost secrets of both countries concerning Enigma - and compared to the atomic program (which at least was known to exist), that remained absolutely secret and unmentionable for another 20 years. So it’s likely that Turing recognized the hopeless position he was trapped in, with nobody to turn to for advice or help.
I’m not summarizing this very well, but Hodges does an impassioned and admirable job.
A couple of things, however, that I would knock this bio for: first, his tendency not to put rather peripheral events in context (incidents in WW2 that didn’t relate directly to Bletchley or Turing, for example). This is all a bit surprising as Hodges is not some historian assuming a bit too much inside knowledge from his audience, but a physicist and mathematician much like Turing himself.
And, I have to mention Hodges� rather outlandish overuse of allusion and metaphor, mostly from The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland . They can be quite obscure, as in:
and:
(She could do mean renderings of ITMA catch-phrases like �... he’s fallen in the waar-tah!�, by the way!)
But this is really minor carping about style. And I should also say that it’s not necessary to understand any mathematics at all to read and enjoy this book; you can simply skip those details and be totally absorbed - for a very long time!
_________
** though do NOT read this on an e-book if you are at all like me and obsessively read every note and reference!
Here finally (well, not really “finally� as it was written in 1983) was someone who could explain Turing’s universal machine and his theory of computable numbers. (Not that I'm sure I understood it, but Hodges� explanations are lucid � unlike Dyson’s muddled and waffly Turing’s Cathedral that I once mistakenly thought was this book.)
Turing was a strange, contradictory character, a shy and bumbling academic but at the same time quite unlike the academic stereotype: as a mathematician, he was so isolated from his peers that he would often formulate “new� theorems unaware that they had already been discovered; but as a result, his methods were idiosyncratic and unconventional, and often led to truly new insights.
His expertise covered a huge range –everything he did had to have some practical application, yet he was the most impractical and disorganized person himself.
His prime fascination was the brain - to make a mechanical model of its logical functions, and the question of whether machines could be made to think. To this end he proposed the criterion of the “imitation game�, where if one could not tell whether responses to questions were from a human or a (hidden) machine, one should consider the machine as behaving like a human. To be capable of “thinking�, however, the machine would also have to learn, independently of its programs, and Turing formulated what he considered appropriate learning schemes.
But here’s the thing � he did not seem to consider the essential need of humans to communicate with each other and interact with their environment as significant to learning and development; “I think of people as pink-coloured sense data�, he said supposedly in jest, but I thought that there was a significant truth there. It all makes me wonder if Turing was not somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Although this is not something that Hodges speculates about, Turing did indeed feel his own life was something of a imitation game.
He was most famous of course for his brilliant work at Bletchley during WW2 in cracking the Enigma codes, and Hodges places him very well at the centre of the decryption effort � but at the same time on the periphery, surprisingly, of the actual development of the Colossus which was the actual precursor of the computer. (This was because computers as such didn’t interest him at all; it was getting them to “think� that was the challenge).
After WW2, he was involved with two projects, one was the paper design for the ACE computer, the other in programming the first actual computer (at Manchester, some time before the more famous ENIAC was completed in the US). His involvement wasn’t exactly peripheral, but he gradually lost interest in it as its limitations became apparent for the cybernetic research he wanted to perform.
Turing was also a homosexual at a time when that was considered an unspeakable depravity and at best an illness. That certainly contributed to the isolation he felt for most of his life, although he wasn’t at all reticent about his orientation either � in that he was a man well before his time. It’s commonly thought that he committed suicide following a conviction for “indecent� activities, but Hodges makes it clear that the two events weren’t connected, as he had put that episode well behind him two years earlier.
What Hodges does very well, in an extended analysis, is place Turing’s death in the context of Britain’s panic over blackmail, homosexuals and spies in the secret services. This was around 1953-4 when the atomic bomb was being developed, and Burgess, McLean and others had defected with both British and US secrets. Hodges doesn’t speculate on whether there was any actual government approach to Turing in that context, but it would have been clear to him that he would have been considered an even greater risk, as during the war he had been privy to the innermost secrets of both countries concerning Enigma - and compared to the atomic program (which at least was known to exist), that remained absolutely secret and unmentionable for another 20 years. So it’s likely that Turing recognized the hopeless position he was trapped in, with nobody to turn to for advice or help.
I’m not summarizing this very well, but Hodges does an impassioned and admirable job.
A couple of things, however, that I would knock this bio for: first, his tendency not to put rather peripheral events in context (incidents in WW2 that didn’t relate directly to Bletchley or Turing, for example). This is all a bit surprising as Hodges is not some historian assuming a bit too much inside knowledge from his audience, but a physicist and mathematician much like Turing himself.
And, I have to mention Hodges� rather outlandish overuse of allusion and metaphor, mostly from The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland . They can be quite obscure, as in:
“Half desired, half dreaded, was the reappearance of the Monstrous Crow, currently flapping ambiguously on the other side of the Atlantic.�or:
“Yet in reaching the niente of his Sinfonia Antartica, he kept as close to his vision as the exigencies of the world allowed.�(yes, that’s Vaughn Williams, but I’m not a lot wiser)
and:
“more the ITMA professor than eminent authority�... well, if it hadn’t been for my mother telling me about It’s That Man Again, the wartime radio program that inspired the Goon Show, I would not have had a clue what that meant.
(She could do mean renderings of ITMA catch-phrases like �... he’s fallen in the waar-tah!�, by the way!)
But this is really minor carping about style. And I should also say that it’s not necessary to understand any mathematics at all to read and enjoy this book; you can simply skip those details and be totally absorbed - for a very long time!
_________
** though do NOT read this on an e-book if you are at all like me and obsessively read every note and reference!
July 6, 2015
That's certainly cleared up a lot of the questions I had following the film. It concerns me that Cumberbatch's Turing seemed to stray dramatically from biographical evidence. The film paints him in a dangerously stereotypical way, as the lone genius, unable to work well with others and with little care for his fellow humans. It would seem the Turing was a well-liked person, albeit one who didn't care very much what people thought of him, especially concerning his sexuality.
If you saw and enjoyed the film I'd definitely recommend this book. It is a long read though, and does have a tendency to go into more technical detail that I personally found necessary. That said, I'm not exactly mathematically inclined, and these passages may be of great interest to those who understand it.
There are a lot of moral and ethical questions about the powers that machines ought to have and their ability to do complex, seemingly human things such as playing chess. Hodges wrote this pre-Internet and desktop computer, so the reader has to fill in some blanks as to where Turing's work eventually led.
Towards the end there is quite a bit about the attitudes towards homosexuality, especially in the post-war period, which are both absurd and incomprehensible from a twenty first century liberal viewpoint. Although we still have a long way to go, it's certainly interesting to see how much attitudes have changed.
For me the human story was what kept me reading. It's a heart breaking one, with many parallels to that of Oscar Wilde, so be prepared for that. I also think that it's a story that needs to be told and shared, particularly considering that the film, while well made and emotionally charged, changes many of the facts.
If you saw and enjoyed the film I'd definitely recommend this book. It is a long read though, and does have a tendency to go into more technical detail that I personally found necessary. That said, I'm not exactly mathematically inclined, and these passages may be of great interest to those who understand it.
There are a lot of moral and ethical questions about the powers that machines ought to have and their ability to do complex, seemingly human things such as playing chess. Hodges wrote this pre-Internet and desktop computer, so the reader has to fill in some blanks as to where Turing's work eventually led.
Towards the end there is quite a bit about the attitudes towards homosexuality, especially in the post-war period, which are both absurd and incomprehensible from a twenty first century liberal viewpoint. Although we still have a long way to go, it's certainly interesting to see how much attitudes have changed.
For me the human story was what kept me reading. It's a heart breaking one, with many parallels to that of Oscar Wilde, so be prepared for that. I also think that it's a story that needs to be told and shared, particularly considering that the film, while well made and emotionally charged, changes many of the facts.
August 14, 2020
List of Plates
Foreword
Preface
--Alan Turing: The Enigma
Postscript
Author's Note
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
Foreword
Preface
--Alan Turing: The Enigma
Postscript
Author's Note
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
June 16, 2021
This is one of those books that I'm really torn on how to rate. On the one hand, I think it was really well and meticulously researched, but on the other hand, it kinda felt like I was experiencing his life in real time through this audio. It was SO very long. SO detailed.
A lot of this book went well over my head. The math, the science, the engineering, the cryptology, the theoretical concepts... I love these things, but that doesn't mean I UNDERSTAND them. I completely admit that I let most of it just wash over me. I listened, but I didn't really try to understand the concepts that were difficult for other fully trained mathematicians to grasp. Plus, as fascinating as I found what he did - I wasn't here for that. I was here for him. And I found him utterly fascinating.
The aspects of Turing's life outside of the technical and mathematical, particularly his homosexuality... that I could definitely understand and truly loved reading about. And that's what let me down the most in this book at the end and had me making stinkface for the last hour and a half of the audio.
We learn, through the course of this book, that Alan was pretty open about who he was. He lived on his own terms, and his sexuality was a sort of open secret. He didn't FLAUNT it, but neither was he ashamed of it, despite the laws around homosexuality being what they were at the time (fucking ignorant and ridiculous if you ask me, but nobody did, so I'm just saying it anyway). He was a unique thinker, and kind of aloof, socially. He was interested in ideas and things and information and concepts much more than he was people. He had trouble really connecting with people or meeting them on their level - he always expected them to come to his level. He didn't really understand the social risks he ran by being who he was... but even when he found out about those risks, was arrested and tried and convicted of "sexual deviancy", and was dealing with the repercussions of that, including telling his family, friends, co-workers and colleagues about his "crime" and conviction, and then undergoing chemical castration, he stayed true to himself and went on with his life, sans shame, sans guilt, sans any sense of moral wrongdoing. He kept working, he kept "having tea" with men, he kept running, he kept calm and carried on, as the saying goes.
And so, it irked the absolute shit out of me that this book upheld the coroner's conclusion that he committed suicide. I didn't know him. I know nothing more than what was in this book, but even based on that, I disagree with this book's agreement with that conclusion and I think it's bullshit. I see no evidence that would support Alan Turing killing himself. What I do see here, and what has me annoyed as fuck, is a marked attempt to frame some very inconsequential things as "evidence" of that conclusion.
For instance, Turing was a long-distance runner. He ran regularly, trained for and ran in marathons, and even came close to qualifying for the Olympics at one point... but near the end of the book, this running was framed as his attempt to "distance himself" or run away from the aspects of himself that he couldn't avoid - IE: his sexuality.
I'm sorry fucking what?
Or, Alan's reading of the book , which deals with homosexuality in a fatalistic and hopeless way, and ends with suicide. Turing read this book a year before his death, but it's presented in such a way by Hodges as to imply that Ծè made such an impact, that it influenced him so deeply, that he poisoned himself. A year later. Right.
This influence of literature is sprinkled throughout the book, quite a lot. Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass were referenced repeatedly, Alan was several times referenced as "Caliban on his island", etc... This was an ongoing theme, and I didn't really understand why until after the Ծè revelation, and then I got pretty angry, because it seemed to imply that his reading of literature held SUCH POWER over him that it impacted his actual life, to the extent that if a gay character felt hopeless and committed suicide, Alan Turing would do the same. And not only that, but the well-known habit of his eating an apple before bed was then morphed into some Snow White "poison apple" nonsense, and it's even mentioned that "nobody recognized the symbolism" of the half-eaten apple when he was found.
Are you fucking kidding me with this?
Hodges dismisses the possibility of his death being accidental, even while listing out all of the exceedingly reasonable and rational and very logical reasons that it would be, all of the evidence that he had every intention of continuing work and social obligations and such, and while listing out all of the areas that a complete lack of evidence exists FOR his committing suicide. I mean, the man was growing breasts from the chemical castration "treatment" of his "sexual deviancy" for TWO YEARS at that point and laughed about it. But SUUURE. He totally offed himself because a book told him to. I cannot roll my eyes harder at this.
Oh wait, maybe it was because a fortune teller told him to. His family crest/motto included the word fortune, so that completely checks out. Mystery solved.
It couldn't POSSSSSIBLY be that he had installed a chemical lab in his apartment and was notoriously lax about safety or cleaning his hands after dealing with chemicals... like potassium cyanide that he was using to plate gold onto spoons. It couldn't POSSSSSSSSSSSSSIBLY be that he either accidentally ingested cyanide or inhaled fumes from the process. Nah. Totally he was re-enacting Snow White. For sure.
This taints the entire book for me, which up until that point was in 4-star territory. But this... No. Honestly, this does SUCH a huge disservice to Alan Turing's memory that it actually ruins the rest of it for me. The last hour of the book being a full essay about how homosexuality was viewed as a security risk to the military and government, and how the stigma of homosexuality was perfect fodder for spies to use as blackmail... but DOESN'T make the logical leap of DESTIGMATIZATION solving all of the fucking problems... that doesn't help either.
I wanted to love this. I knew a little bit about Alan Turing, and learning more about him was fascinating and awesome. I think I would have liked him, if he deigned to talk to me. (I'm not up to his level. He's somewhere up around Everest and I'm in the Everglades.) But the end of this book was a bunch of bullshit, and I really disagreed with and detested the way it framed his death and the circumstances around it.
On the plus side, Britain admitted they fucked up with their treatment of Turing and pardoned him posthumously in 2009. But that wasn't in this book, so Hodges gets no extra credit rating boost from it.
2 stars is probably being generous for how pissy I feel about Hodges' complete garbage framing of Turing's death, but the rest of the book was well researched and thorough and interesting, so... fine. 2 stars.
A lot of this book went well over my head. The math, the science, the engineering, the cryptology, the theoretical concepts... I love these things, but that doesn't mean I UNDERSTAND them. I completely admit that I let most of it just wash over me. I listened, but I didn't really try to understand the concepts that were difficult for other fully trained mathematicians to grasp. Plus, as fascinating as I found what he did - I wasn't here for that. I was here for him. And I found him utterly fascinating.
The aspects of Turing's life outside of the technical and mathematical, particularly his homosexuality... that I could definitely understand and truly loved reading about. And that's what let me down the most in this book at the end and had me making stinkface for the last hour and a half of the audio.
We learn, through the course of this book, that Alan was pretty open about who he was. He lived on his own terms, and his sexuality was a sort of open secret. He didn't FLAUNT it, but neither was he ashamed of it, despite the laws around homosexuality being what they were at the time (fucking ignorant and ridiculous if you ask me, but nobody did, so I'm just saying it anyway). He was a unique thinker, and kind of aloof, socially. He was interested in ideas and things and information and concepts much more than he was people. He had trouble really connecting with people or meeting them on their level - he always expected them to come to his level. He didn't really understand the social risks he ran by being who he was... but even when he found out about those risks, was arrested and tried and convicted of "sexual deviancy", and was dealing with the repercussions of that, including telling his family, friends, co-workers and colleagues about his "crime" and conviction, and then undergoing chemical castration, he stayed true to himself and went on with his life, sans shame, sans guilt, sans any sense of moral wrongdoing. He kept working, he kept "having tea" with men, he kept running, he kept calm and carried on, as the saying goes.
And so, it irked the absolute shit out of me that this book upheld the coroner's conclusion that he committed suicide. I didn't know him. I know nothing more than what was in this book, but even based on that, I disagree with this book's agreement with that conclusion and I think it's bullshit. I see no evidence that would support Alan Turing killing himself. What I do see here, and what has me annoyed as fuck, is a marked attempt to frame some very inconsequential things as "evidence" of that conclusion.
For instance, Turing was a long-distance runner. He ran regularly, trained for and ran in marathons, and even came close to qualifying for the Olympics at one point... but near the end of the book, this running was framed as his attempt to "distance himself" or run away from the aspects of himself that he couldn't avoid - IE: his sexuality.
I'm sorry fucking what?
Or, Alan's reading of the book , which deals with homosexuality in a fatalistic and hopeless way, and ends with suicide. Turing read this book a year before his death, but it's presented in such a way by Hodges as to imply that Ծè made such an impact, that it influenced him so deeply, that he poisoned himself. A year later. Right.
This influence of literature is sprinkled throughout the book, quite a lot. Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass were referenced repeatedly, Alan was several times referenced as "Caliban on his island", etc... This was an ongoing theme, and I didn't really understand why until after the Ծè revelation, and then I got pretty angry, because it seemed to imply that his reading of literature held SUCH POWER over him that it impacted his actual life, to the extent that if a gay character felt hopeless and committed suicide, Alan Turing would do the same. And not only that, but the well-known habit of his eating an apple before bed was then morphed into some Snow White "poison apple" nonsense, and it's even mentioned that "nobody recognized the symbolism" of the half-eaten apple when he was found.
Are you fucking kidding me with this?
Hodges dismisses the possibility of his death being accidental, even while listing out all of the exceedingly reasonable and rational and very logical reasons that it would be, all of the evidence that he had every intention of continuing work and social obligations and such, and while listing out all of the areas that a complete lack of evidence exists FOR his committing suicide. I mean, the man was growing breasts from the chemical castration "treatment" of his "sexual deviancy" for TWO YEARS at that point and laughed about it. But SUUURE. He totally offed himself because a book told him to. I cannot roll my eyes harder at this.
Oh wait, maybe it was because a fortune teller told him to. His family crest/motto included the word fortune, so that completely checks out. Mystery solved.
It couldn't POSSSSSIBLY be that he had installed a chemical lab in his apartment and was notoriously lax about safety or cleaning his hands after dealing with chemicals... like potassium cyanide that he was using to plate gold onto spoons. It couldn't POSSSSSSSSSSSSSIBLY be that he either accidentally ingested cyanide or inhaled fumes from the process. Nah. Totally he was re-enacting Snow White. For sure.
This taints the entire book for me, which up until that point was in 4-star territory. But this... No. Honestly, this does SUCH a huge disservice to Alan Turing's memory that it actually ruins the rest of it for me. The last hour of the book being a full essay about how homosexuality was viewed as a security risk to the military and government, and how the stigma of homosexuality was perfect fodder for spies to use as blackmail... but DOESN'T make the logical leap of DESTIGMATIZATION solving all of the fucking problems... that doesn't help either.
I wanted to love this. I knew a little bit about Alan Turing, and learning more about him was fascinating and awesome. I think I would have liked him, if he deigned to talk to me. (I'm not up to his level. He's somewhere up around Everest and I'm in the Everglades.) But the end of this book was a bunch of bullshit, and I really disagreed with and detested the way it framed his death and the circumstances around it.
On the plus side, Britain admitted they fucked up with their treatment of Turing and pardoned him posthumously in 2009. But that wasn't in this book, so Hodges gets no extra credit rating boost from it.
2 stars is probably being generous for how pissy I feel about Hodges' complete garbage framing of Turing's death, but the rest of the book was well researched and thorough and interesting, so... fine. 2 stars.
February 24, 2015
I watched The Imitation Game last week and I was left in awe, and slightly ashamed of myself for not knowing the contribution of Alan Turing to the war efforts and the advent of the computer age. After the film i bought this book and a few others in order to get to know more about the brilliant man and the code-breaking that went on during WW2. This is an extremely well-written and detailed book, and while a little heavy of the maths side there is nothing not to be expected from a biography about a genius mathematician.
February 7, 2015
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 31, 2012
(4.5) Quite a thorough biography, I prefer the Bletchley Park period, but quite complete picture of his life
I only have a couple of complaints. The book is quite lengthy. I feel that some digressions into the politics at his boarding school, for example, weren't worth diving into to explain the effect it had on his presence there. Hodges also employs this extended mixed metaphor intertwining Alice in Wonderland (apropos), Wizard of Oz (less so), among others. Not sure it helped to continue referring to the Red and White Queens etc.
But apart from that, this was a great read. Very full picture of Turing's life, public and private (and it was mostly private), from troubles as a schoolboy, his sexuality, his codebreaking during WWII, groundbreaking work toward modern computing, and his eventual academic fading, conviction for 'indecency' and sudden suicide.
Few minor bugs, not really worth noting, though surprised they haven't been removed in subsequent editions (book was published in the eighties, right?)
I only have a couple of complaints. The book is quite lengthy. I feel that some digressions into the politics at his boarding school, for example, weren't worth diving into to explain the effect it had on his presence there. Hodges also employs this extended mixed metaphor intertwining Alice in Wonderland (apropos), Wizard of Oz (less so), among others. Not sure it helped to continue referring to the Red and White Queens etc.
But apart from that, this was a great read. Very full picture of Turing's life, public and private (and it was mostly private), from troubles as a schoolboy, his sexuality, his codebreaking during WWII, groundbreaking work toward modern computing, and his eventual academic fading, conviction for 'indecency' and sudden suicide.
Few minor bugs, not really worth noting, though surprised they haven't been removed in subsequent editions (book was published in the eighties, right?)
November 5, 2013
Very detailed and well researched biography. Also big part is devoted to the details of specific maths projects Turing was involved in different periods of his life. The historic period background is well set out, especially in respect of gay rights or total lack of it. Only for me Alan Turing's character and motivation still remained almost total Enigma after emerging from this big book. May be it is simply impossible to "crack" his rich personality.
November 6, 2018
Alan Turing was a mathematician. I have a degree in mathematics. Alan Turing ran marathons. I have run three marathons. Alan Turing lived in and around Wilmslow. I grew up in Poynton, just a handful of miles from Wilmslow. Can you see where I am going with this? HOWEVER, I used my mathematics to write computer programs (and deserted that after a few years) whereas Alan Turing invented computers and computer programming. I finished my marathons in the middle of the pack whereas Alan Turing was up the front, almost appearing at the Olympic Games at one stage. There is no blue plaque in Poynton with my name on it. In short Alan Turing was a genius and I am not.
I read this book partly motivated by a desire to learn more about Turing to help me understand more of Will Eaves� book Murmur, but also because Turing has long been a hero of mine so it was a perfect opportunity to find out more. I discovered that I had known more about Turing’s life than I had thought, but less about his work. This book covers both in detail.
This is a difficult book to read from a 2018 perspective. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, we take so much for granted today in the world of computing. Most of us casually carry around in our pockets more computing power than was available to the Apollo astronauts as they travelled to the moon and back and we rely on the Internet more than we probably care to admit. It is therefore sometimes hard to imagine a world in which there was not a single computer until Alan Turing invented them. The technical details of Turing’s work that are discussed are not easy to understand. I found myself scouring my brain for remnants of my maths degree and, mostly, failing to find anything helpful. The discussions of pure mathematics, logic and cryptography are complex. You have been warned!
The second reason this is a difficult book to read relates to another fundamental difference between me and Alan Turing. I am heterosexual and he was homosexual. Reading from a 2018 perspective, a person’s sexual orientation would not be a big deal, but in Turing’s life time it was: if a man was caught putting his homosexual desires into practice, he was breaking the law and would be punished. As is well known, this is exactly what happened to Turing. Reading the homophobic attitudes of society and of several individuals is very uncomfortable. It is unpleasant to be reminded that my country was once like that.
The book takes us from Turing’s ancestry all the way through to his death (it is still not 100% clear whether it was suicide or a careless accident). It is over 700 pages long. And yet the man himself manages to remain something of an enigma (deliberate pun).
With so few messages from the unseen mind to work on, his inner code remains unbroken. According to his imitation principle, it is quite meaningless to speculate upon his unspoken thoughts. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. But Alan Turing could not possess the philosopher’s detachment from life. It was, as the computer might put it, the unspeakable that left him speechless.
Turing was undoubtedly a genius. And his work was of major significance. The Wikipedia page for him includes the phrase�but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14million lives. Not only did he contribute in a major way to the war effort, but he also is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
With the caveat that many pages of this book are difficult to read because of their mathematical nature, this is required reading for anyone who wants to try to understand one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.
I read this book partly motivated by a desire to learn more about Turing to help me understand more of Will Eaves� book Murmur, but also because Turing has long been a hero of mine so it was a perfect opportunity to find out more. I discovered that I had known more about Turing’s life than I had thought, but less about his work. This book covers both in detail.
This is a difficult book to read from a 2018 perspective. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, we take so much for granted today in the world of computing. Most of us casually carry around in our pockets more computing power than was available to the Apollo astronauts as they travelled to the moon and back and we rely on the Internet more than we probably care to admit. It is therefore sometimes hard to imagine a world in which there was not a single computer until Alan Turing invented them. The technical details of Turing’s work that are discussed are not easy to understand. I found myself scouring my brain for remnants of my maths degree and, mostly, failing to find anything helpful. The discussions of pure mathematics, logic and cryptography are complex. You have been warned!
The second reason this is a difficult book to read relates to another fundamental difference between me and Alan Turing. I am heterosexual and he was homosexual. Reading from a 2018 perspective, a person’s sexual orientation would not be a big deal, but in Turing’s life time it was: if a man was caught putting his homosexual desires into practice, he was breaking the law and would be punished. As is well known, this is exactly what happened to Turing. Reading the homophobic attitudes of society and of several individuals is very uncomfortable. It is unpleasant to be reminded that my country was once like that.
The book takes us from Turing’s ancestry all the way through to his death (it is still not 100% clear whether it was suicide or a careless accident). It is over 700 pages long. And yet the man himself manages to remain something of an enigma (deliberate pun).
With so few messages from the unseen mind to work on, his inner code remains unbroken. According to his imitation principle, it is quite meaningless to speculate upon his unspoken thoughts. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. But Alan Turing could not possess the philosopher’s detachment from life. It was, as the computer might put it, the unspeakable that left him speechless.
Turing was undoubtedly a genius. And his work was of major significance. The Wikipedia page for him includes the phrase�but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14million lives. Not only did he contribute in a major way to the war effort, but he also is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
With the caveat that many pages of this book are difficult to read because of their mathematical nature, this is required reading for anyone who wants to try to understand one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.
October 9, 2014
This biography was a struggle to get through. I picked it up in audiobook form in anticipation of The Imitation Game hitting theaters this fall. I didn't immediately realise how long and thorough it would be, though I knew I was venturing into a topic I knew very little about.
Here's the thing -- the parts of this biography that deal with Alan Turing's personal life are EXTREMELY interesting and well researched. I loved how detailed they were and found it a fascinating portrait of a man I knew very little about. But a great deal of this biography also delved into detailed descriptions of Alan Turing's experiments and inventions, of which I understood almost nothing. I found myself glazing over for big chunks of the book while the author described the different types of codebreaking techniques. I know they were absolutely relevant, but they got so technical that someone like me, with very little ability in math or computer sciences, couldn't make heads nor tails of what was being talked about.
That being said, the story of Alan Turing's life was interesting enough that I kept going through all 30+ hours of the audiobook and I *really* enjoyed the parts that I could understand. The last 3 hours of the audiobook were, in particular, heartbreaking to listen to. The way Turing was treated and the way he ended his life was a terrible, terrible tragedy. It's only a small comfort that we've made tiny strides in gay and lesbian rights -- though the fact that that topic is still a hot debate is shameful.
So despite my boredom through some of this biography, I have to rate it highly because it was incredibly well-written when it came to getting a portrait of Turing's life. I am really looking forward to seeing The Imitation Game and watching this incredible life take form on the big screen.
Here's the thing -- the parts of this biography that deal with Alan Turing's personal life are EXTREMELY interesting and well researched. I loved how detailed they were and found it a fascinating portrait of a man I knew very little about. But a great deal of this biography also delved into detailed descriptions of Alan Turing's experiments and inventions, of which I understood almost nothing. I found myself glazing over for big chunks of the book while the author described the different types of codebreaking techniques. I know they were absolutely relevant, but they got so technical that someone like me, with very little ability in math or computer sciences, couldn't make heads nor tails of what was being talked about.
That being said, the story of Alan Turing's life was interesting enough that I kept going through all 30+ hours of the audiobook and I *really* enjoyed the parts that I could understand. The last 3 hours of the audiobook were, in particular, heartbreaking to listen to. The way Turing was treated and the way he ended his life was a terrible, terrible tragedy. It's only a small comfort that we've made tiny strides in gay and lesbian rights -- though the fact that that topic is still a hot debate is shameful.
So despite my boredom through some of this biography, I have to rate it highly because it was incredibly well-written when it came to getting a portrait of Turing's life. I am really looking forward to seeing The Imitation Game and watching this incredible life take form on the big screen.
December 14, 2010
I managed to finish the book but it was more of a struggle than it should have been. Good stories can tell themselves so why does Hodges have to butt in all the time with his clumsy attempts to link everything in Alan's life to childhood stories and experiences? And Turing's homosexuality, his cruel treatment by the authorities and his eventual suicide speak for themselves; they don't need page after page of Gay Lib exegesis. Less would have been more.
Having got my irritation out of the way - and I was at times very irritated reading this book - I take my hat off to Hodges when it comes to explaining the mathematics and other technical stuff. With a good and ruthless editor this could have been the great book Turing deserves. What a pity it isn't.
Having got my irritation out of the way - and I was at times very irritated reading this book - I take my hat off to Hodges when it comes to explaining the mathematics and other technical stuff. With a good and ruthless editor this could have been the great book Turing deserves. What a pity it isn't.
September 16, 2019
The mathematics go over my head, so it's for me instead...Turing's homosexuality sounds very lonely, as he was unaware of London's underground scene & clumsy in his advances to friends.
May 20, 2018
A movie was made based on this book - The Imitation Game (2014) with Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode.
November 27, 2016
Una biografia sicuramente esaustiva e particolareggiata, ma che tende a esaurire un po� il lettore, almeno quello che, come me, non è ferratissimo in campo scientifico, e che penalizza in parte l’effettivo emergere della personalità di Alan Turing, che fino alla fine, comprese le motivazioni del suo suicidio, resta un enigma.
D’altro canto, come ben chiarisce l’autore nella sua nota finale, il materiale a disposizione è relativamente scarso. Questo, unito all’indubbia riservatezza e ritrosia che caratterizzava il matematico inglese, non consente forse di potersi spingere oltre nel tentativo di comprenderne le ragioni.
Resta, comunque, una lettura molto interessante, anche per quanto riguarda il panorama storico in cui si colloca.
D’altro canto, come ben chiarisce l’autore nella sua nota finale, il materiale a disposizione è relativamente scarso. Questo, unito all’indubbia riservatezza e ritrosia che caratterizzava il matematico inglese, non consente forse di potersi spingere oltre nel tentativo di comprenderne le ragioni.
Resta, comunque, una lettura molto interessante, anche per quanto riguarda il panorama storico in cui si colloca.
March 27, 2013
What a beautiful, kind, compassionate and wonderfully written biography. I cried when I read it, and when I think about it. I like biographies in general, but this one touched a special spot. You cannot but feel awed at the greatness of the personality that is being painted, intimidated by his genius, and infuriated at the obviously horrible treatment he received in return for saving the democratic world! Perhaps no other biography has elicited such a widely varying set of emotions such as this one and poingnantly remind us that we are just pinpoints of transient consciousness adrift in a sea of emotion.
Incidentally, as a practising Buddhist, I am sometimes asked in social circles about Buddhism's position on homosexuality. And to those who understand, I tend to say that Alan Turing would have been a much happier and more productive person had he been born a Buddhist in a Buddhist culture.
I wish Hodges will write a biography of another great mathematician of whom I have come to know recently, and admire, namely, G. H. Hardy. If so, I'll be the first to buy that book.
If you like this book, I highly recommend you watch the British film "Breaking the code", in which Derek Jacobi plays Turing. I also can't wait to see the new version of it come out (apparently Leonardo Di Caprio is tipped to play Turing in it).
Incidentally, as a practising Buddhist, I am sometimes asked in social circles about Buddhism's position on homosexuality. And to those who understand, I tend to say that Alan Turing would have been a much happier and more productive person had he been born a Buddhist in a Buddhist culture.
I wish Hodges will write a biography of another great mathematician of whom I have come to know recently, and admire, namely, G. H. Hardy. If so, I'll be the first to buy that book.
If you like this book, I highly recommend you watch the British film "Breaking the code", in which Derek Jacobi plays Turing. I also can't wait to see the new version of it come out (apparently Leonardo Di Caprio is tipped to play Turing in it).
March 15, 2016
Ponderous in places, fast moving in others, this is the best attempt to capture Turing the man and mathematician. Always awkward; always shy in social situations, he grew to be "a man with a quite powerful build, yet with with the movements of an ' undergraduate' or a 'boy', without an attractive face.
A scholarship boy to a "public (i.e., private) school", Turing suffered the humiliations familiar (since Arnold's day) to any boy who was a loner and terrible at team sports. He hero worshiped (and more) a classmate who encouraged him to study for entrance to Cambridge; Turing, fatefully as it turned out, was admitted to Kings College, Cambridge -- his school chum having died of TB in the interim. A degree followed, where Turing produced his only real scholarly paper, "On Computable Numbers", where he became the first person to imagine a computer. Alan was rewarded by a Kings Fellowship and a one-year Fellowship at Princeton (amidst the great and the greater, yet, on the whole, Alan was too shy to interact with Einstein, or any of the others -- neither public school, nor Cambridge nor Princeton deflected Alan from being "a confirmed solitary."
How much this has to do with being a homosexual is unknown--Turing was remarkably frank about disclosing that fact to his friends. In the end, it proved his undoing.
In any event, the war intervened, and Alan was spirited to Bletchley Park. Although Alan had no talent for management or personnel (nor the inclination to spend any precious time on either), he did, singularly, have the ability to see the big picture when it came to the Nazi's toughest code, the Naval Enigma. That required a limited sub-set of a Universal Turing machine (capable of understanding all instructions it read), but Turing was better than anyone else. And when he thought his department wasn't getting sufficient resources, he wrote to Churchill himself to clear the blockage.
So Britain wins the war--but loses the peace. The economy is in terrible shape for almost a decade; the Empire is dismembered; and Britain becomes the junior partner in the "special relationship" with America. Alan meanwhile, chose one of three government posts offered to build this "electronic brain" he promises. But he chooses poorly, and none of the three really see that it is both a mathematical as well as an engineering challenge--whereas Alan had been working with actual machinery since Bletchley Park days, and knew the two had to be combined. But his social awkwardness prevents him from making the point, and little progress is made.
Alan kept to his principles throughout his life, and he became especially open about his homosexuality after the war. So much so that, when he was burglarized by the friend of a boy he'd picked up, he called the police, not realizing that as a "sex criminal", he was outside the law himself. The burglary was of little interest to the police, but a sex criminal with secrets was. Burgess and MacLean -- also from Kings College, and also homosexuals -- just had defected, astonishing the Brits, who had assumed the "old school tie" was a sufficient security check.
So Turing was convicted of the unspeakable crime, and sentenced not to jail but to chemical castration via estrogen treatments. Which suppressed libido, and made him grow breasts. But Truing's treatment was a year's complete--when he committed suicide by eating a cyanide-poisoned apple at his home. Why then, his friends wondered--"his death came as a shock to those who knew him. . . The trial was two years in the past, the hormone treatments had ended a year before, and he seemed to have risen above it all."
There is no proof, but the reason is either Turing understood, or the British MI6 told him, that he could never work on important government projects anymore. "[T]here was a solid logic to the mind of security, one that could not be expected to take an interest in notions of freedom of development. He had no right to such things, as he would be first to admit. . . [W]hen it came to questions that mattered, there was no doubt he had placed
himself under military law." Without access to the latest information about computers, without contact with his American peers, and with probable termination of his government contracts, Alan Turing was to be placed in a position where his mind was not free to do the work he wanted. Writing to Churchill wasn't going to help this time--so suicide seemed the sole rational alternative.
Hodges's book is a bit long, but likely is to be considered the definitive psychological treatment of the subject, with sufficient math to keep folks such as me interested.
A scholarship boy to a "public (i.e., private) school", Turing suffered the humiliations familiar (since Arnold's day) to any boy who was a loner and terrible at team sports. He hero worshiped (and more) a classmate who encouraged him to study for entrance to Cambridge; Turing, fatefully as it turned out, was admitted to Kings College, Cambridge -- his school chum having died of TB in the interim. A degree followed, where Turing produced his only real scholarly paper, "On Computable Numbers", where he became the first person to imagine a computer. Alan was rewarded by a Kings Fellowship and a one-year Fellowship at Princeton (amidst the great and the greater, yet, on the whole, Alan was too shy to interact with Einstein, or any of the others -- neither public school, nor Cambridge nor Princeton deflected Alan from being "a confirmed solitary."
How much this has to do with being a homosexual is unknown--Turing was remarkably frank about disclosing that fact to his friends. In the end, it proved his undoing.
In any event, the war intervened, and Alan was spirited to Bletchley Park. Although Alan had no talent for management or personnel (nor the inclination to spend any precious time on either), he did, singularly, have the ability to see the big picture when it came to the Nazi's toughest code, the Naval Enigma. That required a limited sub-set of a Universal Turing machine (capable of understanding all instructions it read), but Turing was better than anyone else. And when he thought his department wasn't getting sufficient resources, he wrote to Churchill himself to clear the blockage.
So Britain wins the war--but loses the peace. The economy is in terrible shape for almost a decade; the Empire is dismembered; and Britain becomes the junior partner in the "special relationship" with America. Alan meanwhile, chose one of three government posts offered to build this "electronic brain" he promises. But he chooses poorly, and none of the three really see that it is both a mathematical as well as an engineering challenge--whereas Alan had been working with actual machinery since Bletchley Park days, and knew the two had to be combined. But his social awkwardness prevents him from making the point, and little progress is made.
Alan kept to his principles throughout his life, and he became especially open about his homosexuality after the war. So much so that, when he was burglarized by the friend of a boy he'd picked up, he called the police, not realizing that as a "sex criminal", he was outside the law himself. The burglary was of little interest to the police, but a sex criminal with secrets was. Burgess and MacLean -- also from Kings College, and also homosexuals -- just had defected, astonishing the Brits, who had assumed the "old school tie" was a sufficient security check.
So Turing was convicted of the unspeakable crime, and sentenced not to jail but to chemical castration via estrogen treatments. Which suppressed libido, and made him grow breasts. But Truing's treatment was a year's complete--when he committed suicide by eating a cyanide-poisoned apple at his home. Why then, his friends wondered--"his death came as a shock to those who knew him. . . The trial was two years in the past, the hormone treatments had ended a year before, and he seemed to have risen above it all."
There is no proof, but the reason is either Turing understood, or the British MI6 told him, that he could never work on important government projects anymore. "[T]here was a solid logic to the mind of security, one that could not be expected to take an interest in notions of freedom of development. He had no right to such things, as he would be first to admit. . . [W]hen it came to questions that mattered, there was no doubt he had placed
himself under military law." Without access to the latest information about computers, without contact with his American peers, and with probable termination of his government contracts, Alan Turing was to be placed in a position where his mind was not free to do the work he wanted. Writing to Churchill wasn't going to help this time--so suicide seemed the sole rational alternative.
Hodges's book is a bit long, but likely is to be considered the definitive psychological treatment of the subject, with sufficient math to keep folks such as me interested.
July 30, 2018
I just bought an ebook version of this book because I couldn't wait for delivery of the paper version. I've been interested in Alan Turning years before this sudden mass media burst; and delighted to see his intelligence and accomplishments be recognized.
I'm almost done reading the intros and preface, which are unusually long, but give great background to this man and the world in which he lived. This information is extremely important because his times were so different than they are now in many respects. I shall read on with pleasure and curiosity.
I'm almost done reading the intros and preface, which are unusually long, but give great background to this man and the world in which he lived. This information is extremely important because his times were so different than they are now in many respects. I shall read on with pleasure and curiosity.
November 24, 2018
in the early days of computing, a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of computing were suggested in the Communications of the ACM � turingineer, turologist, flow-charts-man, applied meta-mathematician, and applied epistemologist.- wiki
In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next.- JAK Ferns, Turing's coroner
There have been two big films about Turing (three if you count the uselessly fictionalised Enigma (2001)). All of them are more or less dishonestly melodramatic; for instance they depict Turing's relationship with his dead love Christopher as the driver of his work on machine intelligence. And more generally they depict him as tragic. But he wasn't tragic: we were. In the 1950s we attacked a superlatively profound person, because we were certain it was the right thing to do.
Hodges, whose book began the great public rehabilitation of Turing and served as the source for the films, bears no blame for this: it's one of the best biographies I've ever read (better even than Kanigel on Ramanujan and Issacson on Einstein).
Begin with his achievements:
1935: Mathematical statistics: An independent proof of the Central Limit Theorem.
1935: Group theory: to a theorem of von Neumann's.
1936: Mathematical logic: One of the , an answer to Hilbert's halting problem and an elaboration of the incompleteness of all mathematics, and the formal statement of a single machine that can perform all computable work.
1936: Computability theory: Same paper. Creator thereof.
1936: Automata theory: Same paper. Creator thereof.
1936: Computer engineering: Same paper. Inventor of the stored-program concept, used in all computers since 1950.
1937: Group theory: Proof that general continuous groups cannot be approximated by finite groups.
1938: Mathematical logic: Invention of ordinal logics, an attempt to handle incompleteness.
1938: Analytic number theory: Algorithm ("Turing's method") for calculating values of the zeta-function.
1938: Computer engineering and Mathematical methodology: of an analogue machine to approximate the zeroes of the zeta function.
1939: Cryptanalysis: developed most of the logical methods used against Nazi Germany's naval cipher, Enigma. Including a new sort of indirect frequency analysis, "simultaneous scanning", search trees, an independent invention of Shannon's information entropy (as "Weight of evidence")...
1940: Mechanical engineering: redesigned the Polish Bomba to handle the exponential explosion in the Enigma's state space.
1941: Statistics: independent invention of sequential analysis, for "Banburismus".
1940: Bayesian inference: independent reinvention of Bayes factors and the first approximation of what we would now call empirical Bayes estimation. IJ Good quite rightly calls Bayes factors, "Bayes-Turing factors". (Though it should be Laplace-Turing factors.)
1942: Cryptanalysis: A hand-method for cracking the Lorenz cipher, "Turingery".
1944: Crytography, audio engineering and electrical engineering: Design, proof and much of the construction of "Delilah", an electronic speech encipherment device.
1945-6: Algorithmics: The discovery of the . A neglected but vast accomplishment. (Zuse had already implemented subroutines by then.)
1945-6: Computer engineering: Design of the , the first complete design of a stored-program computer, including circuit diagrams, instruction set and cost estimate. ( is incomplete.)
1948: Computer music: The first computer music. Turing's handbook for the Mark I had a section on using it to produce notes, and they gave , also a first. Not really a synth (not real-time) and not real electronic music (produced by moving parts).
1948: Linear algebra: of solving linear systems and inverting matrices.
1949: Group theory: that the '' is insoluable for cancellation semigroups. Computability mainstream in mathematics by then.
1949: Formal verification: proving that computer programs will behave.
1950: Philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence: His famous one, "Computing machinery and intelligence" is one of the set texts in philosophy, but Computable Numbers is deeper, outlining how computability places limits on what the brain can do, and how difficult it will be to redo. He sees machine learning coming very clearly.
1951: Group theory: Another big result in the word problem for groups. (unpublished)
1951: Chess engine: to play a full game of chess automatically.
1952: Mathematical biology: of how life grows, now a textbook model of morphogenesis.
1952: Number theory: Numerical evidence (computed on the Manchester Baby) for thousands of values of the zeta-function.
1952: Pattern formation: of the "Swift-Hohenberg" equation, 23 years before them.
Copeland estimates that breaking U-boat Enigma saved , a large fraction of which we can lay at Turing's feet. This puts him in the ever. But what is most amazing (and endearing) is just how unsophisticated he was.
As at school, trivial examples of ‘eccentricity� circulated in Bletchley circles. Near the beginning of June he would suffer from hay fever, which blinded him as he cycled to work, so he would use a gas mask to keep the pollen out, regardless of how he looked. The bicycle itself was unique, since it required the counting of revolutions until a certain bent spoke touched a certain link (rather like a cipher machine), when action would have to be taken to prevent the chain coming off. Alan had been delighted at having, as it were, deciphered the fault in the mechanism, which meant that he saved himself weeks of waiting for repairs, at a time when the bicycle had again become what it was when invented � the means of freedom. It also meant that no one else could ride it.
He made a more explicit defence of his tea-mug (again irreplaceable, in wartime conditions) by attaching it with a combination lock to a Hut 8 radiator pipe. But it was picked, to tease him.
Trousers held up by string, pyjama jacket under his sports coat � the stories, whether true or not, went the rounds. And now that he was in a position of authority, the nervousness of his manner was more open to comment. There was his voice, liable to stall in mid-sentence with a tense, high-pitched ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah� while he fished, his brain almost visibly labouring away, for the right expression, meanwhile preventing interruption. The word, when it came, might be an unexpected one, a homely analogy, slang expression, pun or wild scheme or rude suggestion accompanied with his machine-like laugh; bold but not with the coarseness of one who had seen it all and been disillusioned, but with the sharpness of one seeing it through strangely fresh eyes. ‘Schoolboyish� was the only word they had for it. Once a personnel form came round the Huts, and some joker filled in for him, ‘Turing A.M. Age 21�, but others, including Joan, said it should be ‘Age 16�...
It was demeaning, but the repetition of superficial anecdotes about his usually quite sensible solutions to life’s small challenges served the useful purpose of deflecting attention away from the more dangerous and difficult questions about what an Alan Turing might think about the world in which he lived. English ‘eccentricity� served as a safety valve for those who doubted the general rules of society. More sensitive people at Bletchley were aware of layers of introspection and subtlety of manner that lay beneath the occasional funny stories. But perhaps he himself welcomed the chortling over his habits, which created a line of defence for himself, without a loss of integrity.
We have words for this now ("nerd", "wonk", "aspie"), and massive institutions, and even social movements, but at the time he had to make do with "don", and hide inside academia. Again: the problem wasn't him, it was us.
He gets called a mathematician most often, I suppose because people don't want to be anachronistic. But scroll up: his most famous work is as a logician and a systems architect, and much of the rest is statistics and algorithmics and cognitive science. He was falling between several chairs, until computer science caught up with him:
a pure mathematician worked in a symbolic world and not with things. The machine seemed to be a contradiction... For Alan Turing personally, the machine was a symptom of something that could not be answered by mathematics alone. He was working within the central problems of classical number theory, and making a contribution to it, but this was not enough. The Turing machine, and the ordinal logics, formalising the workings of the mind; Wittgenstein’s enquiries; the electric multiplier and now this concatenation of gear wheels � they all spoke of making some connection between the abstract and the physical. It was not science, not ‘applied mathematics�, but a sort of applied logic, something that had no name.
The philosopher-engineer. One of several moments in Hodge's book that left me dumbstruck is Turing about the foundations of mathematics. (In the spring of 1939 they were both teaching courses at Cambridge called that!) Bit awkward, and in my view Alan goes easy on Ludwig. But you still couldn't make it up.
The government employed Turing for 9 years, paying him about £6000 over the duration (£150k in today's money). In that time he produced 3 gigantically advanced systems (most of the system, the and the ACE design), about 10 or 20 years ahead of their time. Hodges sees this as a triumph of managerial socialism. Now, breaking naval enigma for £6k is an unbelievable deal (the savings from undestroyed shipping and cargo would be in the billions). But the government suppressed Delilah and totally screwed up the ACE project. So I'm not sure if we can cheer too much. Keynes says somewhere that
The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.
This is true of Enigma, I suppose. But instructive failures are only helpful if they occur in public. (As at least the ACE report was.)
The most annoying part of the films making up emotionally powerful unifying themes for Turing is that they are already there. (But to grasp them, you'd have to actually display what was most wonderful and important about him, his technical work, and there goes the box office.) Anyway, here's one that made me cry:
In an end-of-term sing-song [at Sherborne, when Turing was 12], the following couplet described him:Turing’s fond of the football field
For geometric problems the touch-lines yield
... another verse had him ‘watching the daisies grow� during hockey... although intended as a joke against his dreamy passivity, there might have been a truth in the observation.
[20 years later] ...One day he and Joan were lying on the Bletchley lawn looking at the daisies... Alan produced a fir cone from his pocket, on which the Fibonacci numbers could be traced rather clearly, but the same idea could also be taken to apply to the florets of the daisy flower.
[30 years later] ...he was trying out on the computer the solution of the very difficult differential equations that arose when [one] followed the chemical theory of [plant] morphogenesis beyond the moment of budding... it also required some rather sophisticated applied mathematics, which involved the use of ‘operators� rather as in quantum mechanics. Numerical analysis was also important... In this it was like a private atomic bomb, the computer in both cases following the development of interacting fluid waves.
...he also developed a purely descriptive theory of leaf-arrangement... using matrices to represent the winding of spirals of leaves or seeds round a stem or flower-head... The intention was that ultimately these two approaches would join up when he found a system of equations that would generate the Fibonacci patterns expressed by his matrices.
...Such observations reflected an insight gained from... [a program called] ‘Outline of Development of the Daisy�. He had quite literally been ‘watching the daisies grow�... on his universal machine.
January 14, 2015
by is an enigma in its own right. Its subject, the British mathematical genius who contributed to the cryptanalysis of the Nazi enigma code and to the beginnings of the computer, was not an easy subject. He was a homosexual at a time when homosexual acts were considered a crime. He was a largely unhappy loner. And he was a powerful intellectual.
Hodges adopts three approaches to his biography. First, he gives the facts of Turing's life as much as it was possible, for a person who largely lacked the ability to analyze his own life. Secondly -- and this takes up the majority of the book -- he follows Turing's ideas in computing and science in general. (At times, Alan Turing seems a history of Britain's contribution to the development of computing.) Finally, after Turing's suicide in 1954, he provides a long polemic about the role of gays in science in a world that was paranoiac about the Cold War and various spy scandals.
Admittedly, I skipped quickly through much of the mathematical discussion, and also through the polemic coda. What held me was the character of Turing himself, his abortive attempts to break out of his loneliness -- all the while shortening the Second World War by his brilliant contributions to cryptanalysis using computer prototypes.
Perhaps it is possible to write a better book about Turing, but among all the other stuff, I think Hodges did a respectable job. As a computer professional, I recognize in Alan Turing one of the great minds in at the start of my field.
Hodges adopts three approaches to his biography. First, he gives the facts of Turing's life as much as it was possible, for a person who largely lacked the ability to analyze his own life. Secondly -- and this takes up the majority of the book -- he follows Turing's ideas in computing and science in general. (At times, Alan Turing seems a history of Britain's contribution to the development of computing.) Finally, after Turing's suicide in 1954, he provides a long polemic about the role of gays in science in a world that was paranoiac about the Cold War and various spy scandals.
Admittedly, I skipped quickly through much of the mathematical discussion, and also through the polemic coda. What held me was the character of Turing himself, his abortive attempts to break out of his loneliness -- all the while shortening the Second World War by his brilliant contributions to cryptanalysis using computer prototypes.
Perhaps it is possible to write a better book about Turing, but among all the other stuff, I think Hodges did a respectable job. As a computer professional, I recognize in Alan Turing one of the great minds in at the start of my field.
August 31, 2017
This biography of Turing, that eventually spawned the recent biopic The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is a solid read and in some ways better than the movie.
The book focuses on more than just Turing's contributions around cracking the Enigma Code which is interesting in and of itself. As discussed in the book Turing made major contributions in bringing about the computer revolution, is called by some the father of modern computing, and played a vital role in advancing the theory of artificial intelligence which is what he was working on when he died in 1954.
The book does not shy away from his homosexuality. However the homosexual acts that led to his downfall are only 15% of the book. I think the movie, perhaps justifiably, over-emphasized the homosexual events but at the same time the movie did Turing a disservice by creating the impression that Turing was autistic, lacked humor and any emotional maturity. From reading the book this view appears to be fabricated or at least significantly embellished. There are enough letters from Turing's own writings and sources quoted in the book that speak to the contrary.
I think the book also does a good job describing in tech speak many of Turing's mathematical insights and breakthroughs, mostly in layman's terms. With that said the writing in this bio is a little choppy at times.
In closing it is difficult to think of a 20th century scientist or mathematician who contributed more to the world than Alam Turing and that includes Einstein. For that reason alone this book is a must read.
The book focuses on more than just Turing's contributions around cracking the Enigma Code which is interesting in and of itself. As discussed in the book Turing made major contributions in bringing about the computer revolution, is called by some the father of modern computing, and played a vital role in advancing the theory of artificial intelligence which is what he was working on when he died in 1954.
The book does not shy away from his homosexuality. However the homosexual acts that led to his downfall are only 15% of the book. I think the movie, perhaps justifiably, over-emphasized the homosexual events but at the same time the movie did Turing a disservice by creating the impression that Turing was autistic, lacked humor and any emotional maturity. From reading the book this view appears to be fabricated or at least significantly embellished. There are enough letters from Turing's own writings and sources quoted in the book that speak to the contrary.
I think the book also does a good job describing in tech speak many of Turing's mathematical insights and breakthroughs, mostly in layman's terms. With that said the writing in this bio is a little choppy at times.
In closing it is difficult to think of a 20th century scientist or mathematician who contributed more to the world than Alam Turing and that includes Einstein. For that reason alone this book is a must read.
December 2, 2016
Like many, I purchased this because I very much enjoyed 'The Imitation Game'; it then sat upon my TBR shelf for well over a year. I felt that I should try my best to read it before 2016 was out, so I squeezed it into my November reading.
As far as biographies go, Alan Turing: The Enigma is incredibly long, running to 679 pages excluding the notes and index. The whole was not as well written as I was expecting, and it did not feel very consistent in places. The intricate mathematical details placed here and there did not always seem necessary, and it read almost like a Further Maths textbook at times. It is quite a difficult book to categorise, and it is by no means a straightforward biography, nor a critique of Turing's work. It occupies a strange middleground, which consequently means that it does not sit quite right with the reader.
Turing was undoubtedly a fantastically bright man, but I thought that the telling of his story would be more compelling than it turned out to be. I do not feel as though I've learnt much more about him from this volume, sadly; Hodges' account is undoubtedly well-researched, but it is also rather disappointing.
As far as biographies go, Alan Turing: The Enigma is incredibly long, running to 679 pages excluding the notes and index. The whole was not as well written as I was expecting, and it did not feel very consistent in places. The intricate mathematical details placed here and there did not always seem necessary, and it read almost like a Further Maths textbook at times. It is quite a difficult book to categorise, and it is by no means a straightforward biography, nor a critique of Turing's work. It occupies a strange middleground, which consequently means that it does not sit quite right with the reader.
Turing was undoubtedly a fantastically bright man, but I thought that the telling of his story would be more compelling than it turned out to be. I do not feel as though I've learnt much more about him from this volume, sadly; Hodges' account is undoubtedly well-researched, but it is also rather disappointing.
December 17, 2014
An exhaustive and exhausting biography of the brilliant Alan Turing. Winston Churchill said WW2 would not have been won except for Turing's invention of the Enigma, a code breaking machine. His work is credited as leading to the modern personal computer. I read this in preparation for the upcoming movie The Imitation Game, and also managed to find and watch an earlier movie, Breaking the Code starring Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing, online. Turing has not been as well known as he should have been, due to the secretiveness of his work and his homosexuality which was a crime in Britain in the 1950's. The circumstances leading to his death are very tragic.
The book was very heavy on cyber-cryptology and physics, and I struggled with much of it. Turing, himself, was an enigma and with a brilliant,fascinating mind. The author deserves a lot of credit for the research, but I found that for the person not versed in mathematics and physics, like myself, much of it lacked readability.
The book was very heavy on cyber-cryptology and physics, and I struggled with much of it. Turing, himself, was an enigma and with a brilliant,fascinating mind. The author deserves a lot of credit for the research, but I found that for the person not versed in mathematics and physics, like myself, much of it lacked readability.
July 18, 2016
عشقت آلان تورنج وتعاطفت معه منذ أن شاهدت فلم "إيميتشن جيم" ولما علمت أن هذا الفلم الرائع مقتبس من أحد الكتب، قررت أن أقرأه وها أنا قد فعلت ذلك.
يتحدث الكتاب عن حياة العالم البريطاني آلان تورنج منذ طفولته، مرورًا بشبابه ومنجزاته العلمية، حتى وفاته المفاجئة. يتطرق كذلك إلى شخصية تورنج وطريقة تفكيره وطباعه، وحتى كتبه المفضلة. ويعطي الكاتب كل موضوع حقه من التفصيل، إذ يبدو أنه قام ببحث عميق لحياة تورنج حتى يقدم لنا هذا الكتاب الذي تزيد عدد صفحاته على ال600. يحتوي الكتاب على بعض الأمور التقنية، خصوصًا فيما يتعلق بمنجزات تورنج العلمية ولكن تغلب عليه اللغة البسيطة سهلة الفهم.
ولد آلان تورنج في عائلة من الطبقة المتوسطة وكان والداه يخدمان في المستعمرات البريطانية في الهند، لذلك كان قليلًا ما يراهما في صغره. منذ أيام دراسته في الابتدائية كانت علامات الفطنة والذكاء واضحة عليه وكان يحب قراءة الكتب، إلا أنه واجه في البداية مشاكل في دراسة بعض المواد الإنسانية كالإغريقية. وكان هذا على خلاف تفوقه المنقطع النظير في المواد العلمية والرياضيات.
في المرحلة الثانوية تعلق بشدة بأحد زملائه لدرجة تقديس التراب الذي كان يسير عليه، وكانت هذه العلاقة تصل لحد العشق من طرف تورنج إلا أنه لم يصرح بذلك لزميله الذي كان متميزًا في المواد العلمية مثله. قبل التخرج من الثانوية بقليل، تعرض تورنج لأكبر صدمة في حياته عندما توفي زميله هذا بمرض السل. ظل تورنج متمسكًا بذكراه حتى آخر عمره، حتى إنه ضاعف من جهوده العلمية اعتقادًا منه بأن روح صديقه تراقبه وتدعمه في عمله.
يحصل تورنج بعد ذلك على بعثة إلى كلية كنجز في جامعة كامبريدج الشهيرة حيث تخصص في الرياضيات. عشق تورنج الرياضيات والمنطق وأبدع بهما، فتم انتخابه للجمعية الرياضية البريطانية وهو بعمر الثانية والعشرين فقط. طوّر تورنج أفكاره حول قدرة الآلات على التفكير وكتب ورقة بحثية شكلت أساسًا مهمًا لتطور الحواسيب. في هذه الفترة بدأ تورنج يتخلى عن الروحانيات ولم يعد يؤمن بوجود إرادة حرة، بل آمن بالتفسيرات المادية البحتة حتى أنه توقف عن الإيمان بوجود إله.
تبدأ المرحلة التالية من حياة تورنج مع ظهور بوادر الحرب العالمية الثانية وهي المرحلة التي ركز عليها الفلم، حيث توكل إليه مهمة قيادة الفريق المسؤول عن تفكيك الشفرة الألمانية "الإنجما" والتي كان يعتقد أنها غير قابلة للاختراق، ولكن تورنج ينجح في ذلك بمساعدة فريقه، وهو ما يسهم في تقدم بريطانيا وأمريكا بشكل ملحوظ في الحرب، خصوصًا فيما يتعلق بمواجهة الغواصات الألمانية في المحيط الأطلسي والتي كانت تستهدف قافلات المؤمن القادمة من أمريكا التي شكلت شريات حياة الجزر البريطانية. قدّر بعض الكتاب أن فك شفرة "الإنجما" قد أسهم في تقليص عمر الحرب العالمية الثانية لأكثر من أربع سنين، حيث أن جميع الاتصالات الألمانية في مختلف أرجاء العالم وكل خططهم كانت مكشوفة لدى الحلفاء.
بعد الحرب يستمر اهتمام تورنج في تطوير آلات تحاكي العقل البشري أو كما أطلق عليها "العقل الاكتروني" وقد استفاد من خبرته أثناء الحرب بشكل كبير، إلا أنه لم يكن يصرح بهذا بسبب سرية الأنشطة التي مارسها آنذاك. كان تريكزه هو على صناعة آلة تستطيع معالجة جميع أنواع المشاكل وتستطيع التعلم والتطوير من نفسها. يساهم تورنج في تطويل أول حاسب آلي في مدينة مانشستر بعد حصول المشروع على دعم مالي من الحكومة.
أما الفصل الأخير عن حياة تورنج فيتعلق بميوله الجنسية المثلية والتي اكتشف وجودها لديه منذ بلوغه. يشرح الكاتب الظروف الاجتماعية للمجتمع البريطاني حينها، وكيف أن الممارسة المثلية للجنس كانت تعتبر جريمة وفقًا للقانون. تكتشف الشرطة وجود علاقة جنسية بين تورنتج وشاب أشقر أزرق العينين في التاسعة عشر من العمر بعد أن يقوم تورنج بالإبلاغ عن جريمة سطو حدثت في منزله. يعترف بشكل شيء للشرطة وتتم محاكمته. بالرغم من دفاع أصدقائه عنه وشهادة عدد من العلماء بكفاءته وأهميته للدولة، فإن المحكمة تقضي عليه المحكمة بالعلاج عن طريق أخذ الهرمونات الأنثوية للتقليل من شهوته، حيث أن المثلية الجنسية كانت ينظر لها على أنها مرض نفسي. تصيب تورنج أعراض كثيرة بسبب هذه الهرمونات منها زيادة حجم صدره وهناك بعض الدراسات تشير إلى تأثير هذه الهرمونات على التفكير أيضًا. بدأ تورنج خلال هذه الفترة بزيارة طبيب نفسي كان متفهمًا بشكل كبير لمشاكله وقد كون علاقة مميزة معه ومع أسرته.
في صبيحة الثامن من يونيو من العام 1954، أي بعد عامين من محاكمته وجدت الخادمة تورنج ممدًا على السرير بلا حراك وبجانبه تفاحة مقضومة. خلصت الشرطة إلى أنه توفي عن طريق الانتحار بأكل تفاحة مغموسة في مادة السيانايد السامة. تنتهي بذلك حياة أحد أبرز علماء القرن العشرين قبل ميلاده الثاني والأربعين بعدة أيام فقط.
بشكل عام كان الكتاب رائعًا وسلسًا، بالرغم من عدم احتوائه على الكثير من التشويق وهو أمر قد يكون متفهمًا لأنه يتحدث عن سيرة شخصية علمية، ولكني قرأت سير لشخصيات علمية أخرى أحسست أنها احتوت مقدارًا أكبر من التشويق، ربما لا يكون هذا بسبب الكتاب ذاته بل بسبب معرفتي لأبرز الأحداث لمشاهدتي للفلم وربما أيضًا بسبب المقارنة بين الإثنين. كشف لي الكتاب بعضًا من الأخطاء التاريخية التي وردت في الفلم وكذلك دفعني للتفكير من جديد في مسألة الأشخاص المختلفين عن المجتمع، وكيف يتم ظلمهم واضطهادهم بسبب أفكارهم أو ميولهم الجنسية بالرغم من تقديمهم خدمات جليلة للوطن.
في ألمانيا النازية، قامت الدولة باعدام جميع المثليين جنسيًا، وقال هاينريش هيملر رئيس القوات الخاصة والشرطة السرية "الجيستابو"، أنه لا يمكن في ألمانيا القبول بأي شخص غير ملتزم بكل القيم النازية، وأنه لن تشفع لهم أي قدرات أو مواهب خاصة. فكان من سخرية القدر أن يساهم عالم ملحد مثلي جنسيًا في إسقاط هذه الدولة الشمولية القمعية. في العام 2009 قامت الحكومة البريطانية على لسان رئيس وزرائها بالاعتذار لما قامت به بحق تورنج وبعد ذلك بأربع سنوات أصدرت الملكة عفوًا عنه. وفي 2014 أصدر الفلم الذي أشرت له عدة مرات والذي نشر قصة تورنج بشكل أوسع للعامة.
يا ترى كم عبقريًا عربيًا هرب إلى المهجر بسبب ضغط المجتمع ورفضه لهم؟ ومتى سنفهم أن حياة الناس الشخصية هي ملك لهم طالما لم يؤذوا أحدًا؟ لا شك أن الكثيرين سيختلفون معي في وجهة النظر هذه، ولكن من ينظر لمصلحة الوطن والأمة سيكون حريص على حفظ جميع طاقاتها، حتى وإن أتت ممن نختلف معهم بشدة.
يتحدث الكتاب عن حياة العالم البريطاني آلان تورنج منذ طفولته، مرورًا بشبابه ومنجزاته العلمية، حتى وفاته المفاجئة. يتطرق كذلك إلى شخصية تورنج وطريقة تفكيره وطباعه، وحتى كتبه المفضلة. ويعطي الكاتب كل موضوع حقه من التفصيل، إذ يبدو أنه قام ببحث عميق لحياة تورنج حتى يقدم لنا هذا الكتاب الذي تزيد عدد صفحاته على ال600. يحتوي الكتاب على بعض الأمور التقنية، خصوصًا فيما يتعلق بمنجزات تورنج العلمية ولكن تغلب عليه اللغة البسيطة سهلة الفهم.
ولد آلان تورنج في عائلة من الطبقة المتوسطة وكان والداه يخدمان في المستعمرات البريطانية في الهند، لذلك كان قليلًا ما يراهما في صغره. منذ أيام دراسته في الابتدائية كانت علامات الفطنة والذكاء واضحة عليه وكان يحب قراءة الكتب، إلا أنه واجه في البداية مشاكل في دراسة بعض المواد الإنسانية كالإغريقية. وكان هذا على خلاف تفوقه المنقطع النظير في المواد العلمية والرياضيات.
في المرحلة الثانوية تعلق بشدة بأحد زملائه لدرجة تقديس التراب الذي كان يسير عليه، وكانت هذه العلاقة تصل لحد العشق من طرف تورنج إلا أنه لم يصرح بذلك لزميله الذي كان متميزًا في المواد العلمية مثله. قبل التخرج من الثانوية بقليل، تعرض تورنج لأكبر صدمة في حياته عندما توفي زميله هذا بمرض السل. ظل تورنج متمسكًا بذكراه حتى آخر عمره، حتى إنه ضاعف من جهوده العلمية اعتقادًا منه بأن روح صديقه تراقبه وتدعمه في عمله.
يحصل تورنج بعد ذلك على بعثة إلى كلية كنجز في جامعة كامبريدج الشهيرة حيث تخصص في الرياضيات. عشق تورنج الرياضيات والمنطق وأبدع بهما، فتم انتخابه للجمعية الرياضية البريطانية وهو بعمر الثانية والعشرين فقط. طوّر تورنج أفكاره حول قدرة الآلات على التفكير وكتب ورقة بحثية شكلت أساسًا مهمًا لتطور الحواسيب. في هذه الفترة بدأ تورنج يتخلى عن الروحانيات ولم يعد يؤمن بوجود إرادة حرة، بل آمن بالتفسيرات المادية البحتة حتى أنه توقف عن الإيمان بوجود إله.
تبدأ المرحلة التالية من حياة تورنج مع ظهور بوادر الحرب العالمية الثانية وهي المرحلة التي ركز عليها الفلم، حيث توكل إليه مهمة قيادة الفريق المسؤول عن تفكيك الشفرة الألمانية "الإنجما" والتي كان يعتقد أنها غير قابلة للاختراق، ولكن تورنج ينجح في ذلك بمساعدة فريقه، وهو ما يسهم في تقدم بريطانيا وأمريكا بشكل ملحوظ في الحرب، خصوصًا فيما يتعلق بمواجهة الغواصات الألمانية في المحيط الأطلسي والتي كانت تستهدف قافلات المؤمن القادمة من أمريكا التي شكلت شريات حياة الجزر البريطانية. قدّر بعض الكتاب أن فك شفرة "الإنجما" قد أسهم في تقليص عمر الحرب العالمية الثانية لأكثر من أربع سنين، حيث أن جميع الاتصالات الألمانية في مختلف أرجاء العالم وكل خططهم كانت مكشوفة لدى الحلفاء.
بعد الحرب يستمر اهتمام تورنج في تطوير آلات تحاكي العقل البشري أو كما أطلق عليها "العقل الاكتروني" وقد استفاد من خبرته أثناء الحرب بشكل كبير، إلا أنه لم يكن يصرح بهذا بسبب سرية الأنشطة التي مارسها آنذاك. كان تريكزه هو على صناعة آلة تستطيع معالجة جميع أنواع المشاكل وتستطيع التعلم والتطوير من نفسها. يساهم تورنج في تطويل أول حاسب آلي في مدينة مانشستر بعد حصول المشروع على دعم مالي من الحكومة.
أما الفصل الأخير عن حياة تورنج فيتعلق بميوله الجنسية المثلية والتي اكتشف وجودها لديه منذ بلوغه. يشرح الكاتب الظروف الاجتماعية للمجتمع البريطاني حينها، وكيف أن الممارسة المثلية للجنس كانت تعتبر جريمة وفقًا للقانون. تكتشف الشرطة وجود علاقة جنسية بين تورنتج وشاب أشقر أزرق العينين في التاسعة عشر من العمر بعد أن يقوم تورنج بالإبلاغ عن جريمة سطو حدثت في منزله. يعترف بشكل شيء للشرطة وتتم محاكمته. بالرغم من دفاع أصدقائه عنه وشهادة عدد من العلماء بكفاءته وأهميته للدولة، فإن المحكمة تقضي عليه المحكمة بالعلاج عن طريق أخذ الهرمونات الأنثوية للتقليل من شهوته، حيث أن المثلية الجنسية كانت ينظر لها على أنها مرض نفسي. تصيب تورنج أعراض كثيرة بسبب هذه الهرمونات منها زيادة حجم صدره وهناك بعض الدراسات تشير إلى تأثير هذه الهرمونات على التفكير أيضًا. بدأ تورنج خلال هذه الفترة بزيارة طبيب نفسي كان متفهمًا بشكل كبير لمشاكله وقد كون علاقة مميزة معه ومع أسرته.
في صبيحة الثامن من يونيو من العام 1954، أي بعد عامين من محاكمته وجدت الخادمة تورنج ممدًا على السرير بلا حراك وبجانبه تفاحة مقضومة. خلصت الشرطة إلى أنه توفي عن طريق الانتحار بأكل تفاحة مغموسة في مادة السيانايد السامة. تنتهي بذلك حياة أحد أبرز علماء القرن العشرين قبل ميلاده الثاني والأربعين بعدة أيام فقط.
بشكل عام كان الكتاب رائعًا وسلسًا، بالرغم من عدم احتوائه على الكثير من التشويق وهو أمر قد يكون متفهمًا لأنه يتحدث عن سيرة شخصية علمية، ولكني قرأت سير لشخصيات علمية أخرى أحسست أنها احتوت مقدارًا أكبر من التشويق، ربما لا يكون هذا بسبب الكتاب ذاته بل بسبب معرفتي لأبرز الأحداث لمشاهدتي للفلم وربما أيضًا بسبب المقارنة بين الإثنين. كشف لي الكتاب بعضًا من الأخطاء التاريخية التي وردت في الفلم وكذلك دفعني للتفكير من جديد في مسألة الأشخاص المختلفين عن المجتمع، وكيف يتم ظلمهم واضطهادهم بسبب أفكارهم أو ميولهم الجنسية بالرغم من تقديمهم خدمات جليلة للوطن.
في ألمانيا النازية، قامت الدولة باعدام جميع المثليين جنسيًا، وقال هاينريش هيملر رئيس القوات الخاصة والشرطة السرية "الجيستابو"، أنه لا يمكن في ألمانيا القبول بأي شخص غير ملتزم بكل القيم النازية، وأنه لن تشفع لهم أي قدرات أو مواهب خاصة. فكان من سخرية القدر أن يساهم عالم ملحد مثلي جنسيًا في إسقاط هذه الدولة الشمولية القمعية. في العام 2009 قامت الحكومة البريطانية على لسان رئيس وزرائها بالاعتذار لما قامت به بحق تورنج وبعد ذلك بأربع سنوات أصدرت الملكة عفوًا عنه. وفي 2014 أصدر الفلم الذي أشرت له عدة مرات والذي نشر قصة تورنج بشكل أوسع للعامة.
يا ترى كم عبقريًا عربيًا هرب إلى المهجر بسبب ضغط المجتمع ورفضه لهم؟ ومتى سنفهم أن حياة الناس الشخصية هي ملك لهم طالما لم يؤذوا أحدًا؟ لا شك أن الكثيرين سيختلفون معي في وجهة النظر هذه، ولكن من ينظر لمصلحة الوطن والأمة سيكون حريص على حفظ جميع طاقاتها، حتى وإن أتت ممن نختلف معهم بشدة.
January 16, 2023
Have you ever seen that internet meme that says IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THANK A HOMOSEXUAL ATHEIST? The genius referred to, of course is Alan Turing, yet it's safe to state that of the billions who use the internet few know his name or reputation. Andrew Hodges set out to discover the secrets of the man who broke the Ultra secret of World War II, the German military code, while at the same time working on designs for "the ultimate thinking machine", meaning the modern computer. Turing was a hard-nosed atheist-materialist who, much like Albert Einstein, believed that everything in the universe could be expressed through mathematical formulas. This gave him an advantage over those who believed code-breaking was far more difficult; one had to read the enemy's mind---a notion repugnant to Turing. In a similar vein, he convinced himself, although not others at Cambridge University, that not only could a super-computer be built but that in practice, not just principle, it would both contain all the knowledge humankind had ever accumulated and develop its own language. (This put him in opposition with another homosexual genius at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who thought human thought is social; machines, no matter how smart, can never know or duplicate human thinking. Odd fact: the two Cambridge contemporaries never met.) Turing, an apolitical man, ran afoul of the British authorities during the Red Scare after World War II. His sexuality made him suspicious in the eyes of the same British intelligence that had employed him during the war. His death was a kind of gay martyrdom. Hodges' biography is exhaustive, and you may want to skip the mathematical formulae, but well-worth reading. as it deals with one of the giants who made the postmodern world possible.
February 21, 2016
I watched the movie Imitation Game and was fascinated by Alan Turing's story. I was so excited to get the book the movie was based on. Imagine my disappointment when I couldn't even finish this book; which doesn't happen often for me. This is one of those few times where the movie is FAR better than the book. I heard there is an abridged version; maybe I should have tried reading that book instead.
This book was not about Alan Turing's life. This book was about dissecting the education and learning and accomplishments of Alan Turing. The first 120 pages I dutifully read every word, though I kept getting lost during the math and science break-downs. Then I started skimming; trying to pick up on the parts of the book that focused on him as a person and what his life was like. But the author wove Alan's work so tightly into the story that it became impossible to separate the two. I made it about half way through the story and gave up when I realized I was flipping pages instead of reading pages. I found very little about Alan as a person in this story which is ultimately the reason I gave up.
I'll have to do a little research and find a better author that captures Alan's life in a way I can understand and read. But if you like math and analysis and detail regarding processes and theories... this is the book for you.
This book was not about Alan Turing's life. This book was about dissecting the education and learning and accomplishments of Alan Turing. The first 120 pages I dutifully read every word, though I kept getting lost during the math and science break-downs. Then I started skimming; trying to pick up on the parts of the book that focused on him as a person and what his life was like. But the author wove Alan's work so tightly into the story that it became impossible to separate the two. I made it about half way through the story and gave up when I realized I was flipping pages instead of reading pages. I found very little about Alan as a person in this story which is ultimately the reason I gave up.
I'll have to do a little research and find a better author that captures Alan's life in a way I can understand and read. But if you like math and analysis and detail regarding processes and theories... this is the book for you.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 2, 2014
Alan Turing is one of the most fascinating people of the twentieth century, yet you'd never know from reading this book. Don't pick it up expecting true insight into its subject - although the biographer himself admits a lot of source material has been lost or destroyed over the years, especially Turing's personal papers mentioning his personal life - as it dwells upon his scientific accomplishments. That's all well and good if you were reading a text for a uni course on crypto graphics or early computer studies, but when you want to read about the person you will be disappointed.
Much of the last year of Turing's life is glossed over in one sentence, "a year later, he was dead". What? There is nothing to tell us about that year? We race ahead to the suicide, and after many many dry pages of theory interspersed with one about Turing the man, I cannot help but feel flummoxed.
Much of the last year of Turing's life is glossed over in one sentence, "a year later, he was dead". What? There is nothing to tell us about that year? We race ahead to the suicide, and after many many dry pages of theory interspersed with one about Turing the man, I cannot help but feel flummoxed.
November 26, 2014
This is a very, very in depth biography. So much that there were parts that I had to skip -admittedly mostly the actual mathematics portions which go quite a bit over my head. I can see what this was so well received, especially considering when it was written originally. If you're looking for something that really gets down the nitty gritty with regards to Alan Turing this is definitely your best bet. If you're looking for something to read to feel prepared to head into the film that's loosely based on it (The Imitation Game) you may find this a bit overwhelming.
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