Alan Turing: The Enigma

Alan Turing: The Enigma book cover

This book, written by Andrew Hodges and published in 1983, is the biography of the British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing. Including his involvement at Bletchley Park during WW2, his work on biology and the creation of the computer and artificial intelligence this is the most thorough publication of his life. Sadly, he was a homosexual. I say sadly because it was not a good time to be one, he was eventually arrested and forced to go through a "chemical castration" for a year. All of this, including his contributions to science were made before his suicide in 1954.

I read this book after watching the movie and in this case it was better this way. The movie helped me ease into the difficult description of advanced mathematics and physics. Having said this, in no way is the book as easy to understand as the movie. Explaining how Turing thought and his multiple experiments was tough to understand. I understand the book simply can't be short but it definitively could've been less like a math class. Putting that aside, the book was good. I learned so much of history and how being different was bad. It caught my attention how during the 50's being a homosexual was equivalent to being more reliable to give in to pressure or blackmail and that due to this belief, no homosexuals were allowed in big government positions. It is a big book, about 700 pages long so it is no easy walk but to understand how it all evolved from the Manchester Mark I to what we now use everyday as regular computers is quite a development. Alan had a vision of "Universal Machines" that could do everything, even think (later called Artificial Intelligence). It is hard to give a review of such a long book considering that I wish to leave it as spoiler free as possible and still convey how awed I feel after reading this Man's life. As the movie says: "Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."
This book only has 3.5/5 stars because it is long and hard to keep up with but I truly think the story is worth reading.