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Loading... Alan Turing: The Enigmaby Andrew HodgesLibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  celephicus | May 22, 2009 |  Alan Turing. My all time hero. (  ) slowcheetah | Apr 23, 2007 | A good biography, which manages to balance an explicit "gay agenda" along with the more impartial account of his intellectual life and peculiarities of character. It's an academic work with all sources carefully cited, which I appreciated also. Turing of course comes across as a very sympathetic figure, but his quirks are made quite clear as well. Particularly interesting for me was the insight I gained into the British class system and how significant this was for the war effort and in general the 'high intellectual' culture. It seems as if Turing was such an odd bird he couldn't have achieved anything like as much as he did without being treated as an upper-class twit. Also fascinating (and disturbing) was the institutionalised gay repression that (presumably) led to Turing's suicide. I've lost the page reference in the biography, but googling tells me that in 1991 homosexuality was still grounds for dismissal from the British military -- as I recall, Hodges comments on the policy change for the secret service, which was even later. (  )1  tikitu-reviews | Mar 11, 2007 | An excellent biography of Alan Turing. ( ) richardtaylor | Sep 27, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing/List of books on the history of computing |
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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
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:20 -0400)
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One thing occurs to me: the British establishment looked on gays with horror as they thought that they could be blackmailed into spilling the secrets. Why not just tell your employer "I'm gay, but I'll keep quiet about it", then you couldn't be blackmailed.