AL AN TURING: THE ENIGMA
THE BO OK TH AT INSPIR ED THE FIL M
TH E IM ITATION GAM E
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. Since 1983
his main work has been in the mathematics of
fundamental physics, as a colleague of Roger Penrose.
But he has continued to involve himself with Alan
Turing’s story, through dramatisation, television
documentaries and scholarly articles. Since 1995 he
has maintained a website at www.turing.org.uk to
enhance and support his original work.
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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 he 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
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‘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
‘An almost perfect match of biographer and subject…. [A] great
book.’
Ray Monk, Guardian
‘A captivating, compassionate portrait of a first-rate scientist who
gave so much to a world that in the end cruelly rejected him. Perceptive and absorbing, Andrew Hodges’s book is scientific biography at its best.’
Paul Hoffman, author of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
‘A remarkable and admirable biography.’
Simon Singh, author of The Code Book and Fermat’s Enigma
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ANDREW HODGES
Alan Turing:
The Enigma
The Book That Inspired the Film
The Imitation Game
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
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Published in the United States by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
Published
by Vintage 2014
press.princeton.edu
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Andrew Hodges 1983
Preface copyright © Andrew Hodges 2014
Andrew Hodges has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out,
or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior
consent in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition,
including this condition, being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser
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
This edition published inVintage
the United Kingdom in 2014 by
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952514
ISBN: 978-0-691-16472-4
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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784700089
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