ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA Andrew Hodges is Tutor in Mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford University. His classic text of 1983, since translated into several languages, created a new kind of biography, with mathematics, science, computing, war history, philosophy and gay liberation woven into a single personal narrative. He is an active contributor to the mathematics of fundamental physics, as a follower of Roger Penrose. See www.turing.org.uk for further material.
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TO THEE OLD CAUSE!
The dedication, epigraphs, and epitaph are taken from the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman.
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‘Alan Turing was by any reckoning one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the century. A brilliant mathematician at Cambridge in the ’30s, Turing discovered that his was precisely the kind of intelligence needed by Britain during the war and became the presiding genius at Bletchley Park, the boffin centre which cracked the German Enigma code. (A character in McEwan’s The Imitation Game was loosely based on him.) There he became obsessed by the notion of machine intelligence and was, in effect, the father of the modern computer. Mistrust and bureaucracy, however, frustrated many of his plans after the war, when Turing was to discover that though he was the master of his own sphere, politically he remained as his was in 1941 – a servant. A homosexual, Turing found his own morality and scientific ideas increasingly at odds with the values of the state which he served. Eventually, he committed suicide. Andrew Hodges’s book is of exemplary scholarship and sympathy. Intimate, perceptive and insightful, it’s also the most readable biography I’ve picked up in some time’ Richard Rayner, Time Out
‘Researched and written extraordinarily well. It is a first-class contribution to history and an exemplary work of biography’ Nature
‘Life and work are both made enthralling by Hodges, himself a scientist’ Sunday Times
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‘This rather shadowy figure has now finally been lifted into the light of day . . . it has to be said that Andrew Hodges has put together an extraordinary story’ Sunday Telegraph ‘This book has a great deal to offer: clear technical descriptions set against their backgrounds; the story of a man largely at odds with the system he lived in: and the puzzle of Alan Turing himself’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘Andrew Hodges, in this fine biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, brings Turing the thinker and Turing the man alive for the reader and thus allows us all to share in the privilege of knowing him’ Financial Times ‘This is not a book to be argued about. It is a book to be read’ New Scientist ‘A major work at any level. Recommended’ Personal Computing World
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THE CENTENARY EDITION With a foreword by Douglas Hofstadter and a new preface by the author
ANDREW HODGES
Alan Turing: The Enigma
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Unauthenticated Download Date | 2/10/18 11:36 PM
Published in the United States by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 press.princeton.edu First published in 2012 by Vintage, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA www.vintage-books.co.uk Copyright © 1983 by Andrew Hodges Preface to the 2012 Centenary edition copyright © 2012 by Andrew Hodges Foreword copyright © 2000 by Douglas Hofstadter All Rights Reserved First published by Burnett Books Ltd in association with Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1983 Unwin Paperbacks edition, 1985 Reprinting, 1985 (twice), 1986, 1987 (twice) First published by Vintage in 1992 Library of Congress Control Number 2012935958 ISBN 978-0-691-15564-7 Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1
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