Alan Turing: the enigma

This biography of Alan Turing is one of the best biographies of any type I've read. Andrew Hodges explores the known facts of Turing's life, goes into the details of his mathematical, philosophical and scientific work, and tells a convincing story about Turing's inner life based on papers left behind and testimony from friends and associates. He also does a good job of explaining the distinct way that the time in which Turing lived shaped the story of his life. It's a weighty, substantial book, but very readable even for someone (me) who isn't particularly strong in math.

This is also the book which the movie The Imitation Game credits as its inspiration. The movie oversimplifies the story (necessarily?) in places, but also takes liberties with the facts (annoyingly). See the movie as a fairy tale, but read the book for a real, complex, and completely fascinating interpretation of Turing's story.

From a technical aspect the book is great. However, for the side of me that wants a novel to entertain, this was not it. Many chapters had the same enjoyment as the chapter from the Grapes of Wrath about the ants crawling on the turtle. They seemingly added little to the story. Other times the story seemed to drift away from Alan Turning and more to the technology as a whole. Yes, I understand that the reader needs to know what was going on, but the meat of the story sometimes didn't seem to focus on its subject. Overall,I enjoyed it, even if it was a bit long at times.

This book in many places was a long plod through intricacies of mathematics and cryptography with only slight glimpses into the man who was Alan Turing. Persistence will be rewarded, eventually, as the picture of Turing emerges from a tedious chronology– an incredible genius and worthy of the label “visionary,” yet hopelessly naive in the workings of the world, both political and social. He anticipated a universal computer and laid the foundations for artificial intelligence, yet in his later years, he was relegated to a sarcastic footnote in contemporary accounts of the development of the computer.

A reader who dares to attempt this tome surely knows that Alan accepted his homosexuality as a part of his being and that he was crushed by the (conservative) British society he had a significant role in preserving with his code-breaking contributions, particularly in breaking the Enigma encryptions for the Atlantic sea campaigns. The author has made a remarkable effort in assembling from available records this portrait of a complicated man who advanced mathematics and computing, yet tragically was unable to realize all he envisioned.