Manor matters enigma9/25/2023 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. Andrew Hodges’s book is of exemplary scholarship and sympathy. A homosexual, Turing found his own morality and scientific ideas increasingly at odds with the values of the state which he served. 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 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. 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. ‘Alan Turing was by any reckoning one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the century. TO THEE OLD CAUSE! The dedication, epigraphs, and epitaph are taken from the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman. He is an active contributor to the mathematics of fundamental physics, as a follower of Roger Penrose. 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. Citation previewĪLAN TURING: THE ENIGMA Andrew Hodges is Tutor in Mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford University.
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