Alan Turing is one of my personal heroes and was a genius of unmatched ability. In almost all ways he was a man ahead of his time. It is a huge shame on the British government that his life ended the way it did.
Andrew Hodges' excellent biography of Turing left quite an impression on me as I read it while stuck in the Camusunary mountain bothy on Skye by myself waiting for the weather to clear - which took about five days!
Hodge's biography is great. Also recommended is "The Annotated Turing" by Charles Petzold (yes, that Charles Petzold) which is a heavily annotated walkthrough of Turing's paper "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"), and for the hardcore Turing fan, "The Essential Turing" by Jack Copeland.
My fetish for the Kindle continues... it's a real shame back catalogue items like this aren't available. I find it so hard to buy physical books nowadays beyond large reference books.
I will have to make an exception though, it looks like a great book.
Two thousand years from now we will still remember the greeks that we know today, and then there will be a few extra names, I'm fairly sure that Einstein and Turing will be two of those names.
We'll also find Turing's prosecution as insane as Galileo's. I suppose the overwhelming majority of us already do, but hopefully in the year 4000 even the most conservative of religious folk will consider the "crime" of homosexuality to be as invalid as the "crime" of claiming that the earth revolves around the sun. I'm looking at you Uganda!
Yes, it is an honour to have been asked to appear. Haven't started real filming yet so I don't know what my final role will be, but I'm hoping (having talked to the writer) that this will be a good film.
No tension, no drama, no rhythm, no appeal to curiosity, no humour, just bored people enunciating facts and opinions in a bland way.
I wouldn't want it to start with a gloomy "In a wuuurld ...", but still, the trailers have evolved to their current format for a reason: they trigger interrest. If you want to bring Turing to the awareness of the masses, you must fight your attention grabbing peers on their field. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
I hope that they'll fix it soon, and that film will be less boring than this.
Very cool. But somebody's line in the trailer kind of implied he broke the german codes. AFAIK, it was done in Poland just before the invasion. Even the first "bomba" was Polish.
I would have thought that the theoretical concept of the Universal Turing Machine, the first theoretical model of a true universal stored program computer, would be regarded by most as his most important contribution:
A trivia that I find interesting as an Indian is that his parents came from a background in the executive branch of the Indian government.