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ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA

TO THEE OLD CAUSE!

The dedication, epigraphs, and epitaph are taken from the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman.

‘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

‘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

THE CENTENARY EDITION

With a foreword by Douglas Hofstadter and a new preface by the author

ANDREW HODGES

Alan Turing: The Enigma

Published in the United States by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 press. princeton. edu