Alan Turing: The Enigma | 
 enlarge | Author: Andrew Hodges
Creator: Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
Buy New: $37.00
New (6) Used (11) Collectible (1) from $28.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 612695
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1.5
ISBN: 0802775802
Dewey Decimal Number: 510.92
EAN: 9780802775801
ASIN: 0802775802
Publication Date: March 1, 2000
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Amazon.com Review
Alan Turing died in 1954, but the themes of his life epitomize the turn of the millennium. A pure mathematician from a tradition that prided itself on its impracticality, Turing laid the foundations for modern computer science, writes Andrew Hodges: Alan had proved that there was no "miraculous machine" that could solve all mathematical problems, but in the process he had discovered something almost equally miraculous, the idea of a universal machine that could take over the work of any machine. During World War II, Turing was the intellectual star of Bletchley Park, the secret British cryptography unit. His work cracking the German's Enigma machine code was, in many ways, the first triumph of computer science. And Turing died because his identity as a homosexual was incompatible with cold-war ideas of security, implemented with machines and remorseless logic: "It was his own invention, and it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs." Andrew Hodges's remarkable insight weaves Turing's mathematical and computer work with his personal life to produce one of the best biographies of our time, and the basis of the Derek Jacobi movie Breaking the Code. Hodges has the mathematical knowledge to explain the intellectual significance of Turing's work, while never losing sight of the human and social picture: In this sense his life belied his work, for it could not be contained by the discrete state machine. At every stage his life raised questions about the connection (or lack of it) between the mind and the body, thought and action, intelligence and operations, science and society, the individual and history. And Hodges admits what all biographers know, but few admit, about their subjects: "his inner code remains unbroken." Alan Turing is still an enigma. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Product Description
Alan Turing (1912-54) was a British mathematician who made history. His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic. But Turing's vision went far beyond the desperate wartime struggle. Already in the 1930s he had defined the concept of the universal machine, which underpins the computer revolution. In 1945 he was a pioneer of electronic computer design. But Turing's true goal was the scientific understanding of the mind, brought out in the drama and wit of the famous "Turing test" for machine intelligence and in his prophecy for the twenty-first century. Drawn in to the cockpit of world events and the forefront of technological innovation, Alan Turing was also an innocent and unpretentious gay man trying to live in a society that criminalized him. In 1952 he revealed his homosexuality and was forced to participate in a humiliating treatment program, and was ever after regarded as a security risk. His suicide in 1954 remains one of the many enigmas in an astonishing life story.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 interesting portrait of a compelling misfit July 9, 2004
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book is well titled as the real Alan Turing was an enigma to many of those who knew him and perhaps even to himself. It is another example of how genius moves to its own rhythms and manages to get noticed in spite of itself.
Turing is, more than anyone else, the father of the modern computer, a man who could visualize something which did not even exist. It was his vision that eventually came to be the most powerful innovation in the last half century. Hodges book explores Turing's entire life and illuminates the context in which apparently arcane and irregular thinking came to have profound ramifications at the right moment and time.
A scientifically useful biography February 4, 2004
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I read part of this book in 1985 while trying to understand chaotic orbits. The problem was to understand how an orbit can be deterministic and apparently random. When I read Hodges' description of the Turing machine then I realized that it is easy to answer the question, and was able to write down the answer: one simply digitizes the map or ode, initial condition, and all the control parameters in some base of arithmetic, and then studies the action of a (digitized) positive Liapunov exponent on a digit string. I can't comment on the rest of the book, but Hodges does a very good job of presenting Turing's ideas of computable numbers and computable functions. When my collaborator Palmore read the description I refer to here, he said that he nearly fell out of his chair. We solved the problem of computability of chaotic orbits in that era together.Is there a good book on computability and automata? So far, all the automata texts that I'm aware of are written in a special holy language of abstract computerize. The language erects an unnecessary barrier to understanding the basic ideas. Is Turing's original paper a proof, or an explanation of what he'd understood? I don't know, but I can refer the reader to "Descartes' Dream" by Reuben and Hersch for perespective.
Good biography, perhaps too long. October 24, 2003
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you consider to read this book in order to know about Alan Turing's life, definetely this is the book. In it you will learn about the code breakers, about the WWII spy technology and also about the science aplied to War, however, when I read it I found out that sometimes too many pages (550) can make it boring (more than 20 pages dedicate about how to build a subroutine in a program, more than 20 pages about homosexuality laws, more than 20 pages about historic information from India). Being so detailed makes sometimes forget about the main issue. That is why I didn't give it 5 stars.
 Essential. September 20, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The one and only Turing biography you'll ever need, long enough to satisfy even the most hardcore Turing admirers. Irreproachably researched and thorough. I only wish Hodges offered an abridged version I could recommend to my friends- this book is too detailed for casual readers.
 Too much detail for me September 26, 2002
3 out of 15 found this review helpful
I found the story of Alan Turing's life to be very interesting. His original work on dreaming up a "thinking machine" that would eventually become what we know as a computer and his work on breaking the German "enigma" code are worth knowing about. His tragic end is cause for us all to remember the importance of tolerance. However, I found this book to be too long and detailed for my tastes. I think the story could have been told in one half or one third the space. So I would recommend that anyone interested in the history of science read a biography of Turing, but a different one than this book.
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