Alan Turing: the enigma

Chosen by the author, Andrew Hodges

See the main page on Alan Turing: the enigma for full details about the book.

At present there are just three extracts:

• Extract from Chapter 1 (pages 33-36)

  This passage describes how in 1928 Alan Turing met and befriended another boy in his school, Christopher Morcom. This development ended his social isolation, and inspired his future progress. But it was also traumatic: this was not only first love, but led to a sudden and cruel bereavement.



• Extract from Chapter 2 (pages 70-76)

  This passage describes the moral and poltiical ambience at King's College, Cambridge University, where Alan Turing became a mathematics undergraduate in 1931, his response to this extraordinary environment, and his emotional development in 1933.



• Extract from Chapter 6 (pages 326-7)

  These pages concern Alan Turing's world-leading computer design of 1946. This passage explains the most important aspect of Turing's original plan for the Automatic Computing Engine: not the details of the hardware,  but the principles as set forth by Turing which underlay the development and scope of software  for the rest of the century.

andrew@synth.co.uk