Alan Turing, The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

From The Week of March 28, 2010

To a large extent, Alan Turing is the intellectual father of the personal computer. Though his suicide, shamefully brought about by the prejudice of the British government, kept him from seeing his dream realized, I can hope that, somewhere, Mr. Turing comprehends that few souls have had a more profound impact on their century than he. Mr. Hodges' dry account of Mr. Turing's life is far too long and far too mathematical for my tastes, but his subject is so compelling that obsession with detail does not spoil the experience.

Alan Turing had many of life's advantages. Born in 1912, into a pre-war Britain still encloaked in the trappings of empire, Turing was raised in an intellectual family. He was sent to excellent schools which helped to cultivate his prodigious talent for mathematics. His aptitude was such that, when Britain entered WWII and found itself in need of codebreakers, he was recruited to head an elite team at Bletchley Park tasked by the British government to break German Naval codes at which he, and they, were successful. We'll never know to what extent Mr. Turing helped to win the Second World War, but that he had a major hand in breaking Enigma, and that breaking Enigma gave the British government unfettered access to the German chain of command, surely gave the Allies a hand up over their enemies. In any event, it was after the war that Mr. Turing's contributions to our modern world came to light, when, at the University of Manchester, he predicted, imagined, and planned out a thinking machine, a computer capable of performing calculations on its own complex enough to necessitate that he come up with a Turing test for determining whether or not a computer possessed artificial intelligence. But before his work could advance beyond the preliminary stages, his homosexuality was discovered, a truth which ended his work, had his security clearance revoked, and forced him onto medications that would chemically castrate him. Mr. Turing committed suicide in 1954, not long after his conviction on charges of gross indecency, an injustice the Brown government apologized for on September 10th, 2010.

It may mean nothing that Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, three of the giants of the technological evolution of the last 50 years, were born within 18 months of Mr. Turing's death. Or Perhaps the Second World War did far more to advance the journey of the personal computer than Mr. Turing did; this is yet another thing we may never know. But it was Sir Isaac Newton who said, "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." War may have provided the necessary funding for the research and development of the technologies we use every day, but those technologies had to be envisioned before they could be realized. They had to be invented. And Mr. Hodges convinces, here, that no one did more to shape our present than the brilliant and wronged Alan Turing. (3/5 Stars)