"Certainly it would have been a comfort to him to imagine that Christopher Morcom's spirit, in some sense, had not just outlived his body but remained in the same "universe" as Turing."

Yeah, okay, so... damn. If anything, this book sure confirmed my deep love for Alan Turing. Because I really do. He was truly a wonderful man, and quite cool in his own weird way.

As for the book, I did feel a bit peeved that it focused so much not only on Turing's work but also the work of others within his field. I do understand why this was partly necessary but while it's interesting, it takes up most of the book in a way that introduces Turing only like, twenty pages into the book. If I purely wanted to learn about his work, I would've gone for one of his reports or any paper discussing his works. Because as much as a book about Alan Turing wouldn't be complete without it... a person is more than just their hobby/interest and Leavitt seemed to have forgotten that. I felt as if he got carried away when he realised he probably would have to explain some of the basics surrounding Turing's work... and ended up with a book partly made up by the work and research by other people. That'd be like spending half a Tolkien biography purely on examples of linguistics and the creation of complex fictional languages.

But there were a lot of glimpses that made the read more than worth it; and I certainly did get to know Turing better by the end of it. As complex as he was, he was quite beautiful and his refusal to be anyone but himself made me feel more safe in refusing to be anyone but myself too. ( )

This is a game effort by a novelist to write a somewhat mathematical biography of a mathematician. The novelist is a gay novelist, and the subject was a gay mathematician; the biography argues for a strong connection between Turing's homosexuality and his mathematical research. I can't get behind this idea too strongly, but I couldn't claim that it was wrong, either.

There is an excellent quotation about Turing's attitude to a profound mathematical question: "Turing was probably in neither group. His isolation (not to mention his homosexuality) disinclined him to over identify with larger collectives." My stance is probably similar.

The initial discussion of set theory and the paradox of the set which can neither be a member of itself or a member of its complement is well-presented, but the discussion of Godel's work communicates very little. It is possible to blame Godel for this, though. His construction is a lot of work.

The first Turing machine, on page 68, doesn't work for any right-side operand other than 11 (2). That is, it gives the right answer only if the right operand is 2. It would have made more sense if it had just been a +2 machine. The machine on page 71 works as advertised. As the chapter, "The Universal Machine" winds on its way, the Turing machines become less clearly defined and the paradox is so rushed as to be incomprehensible. I longed to read a more technical discussion that would actually convince.

(Note I had fun entering the first Turing machine in https://turing9000.com, a really visually attractive Turing machine simulator. But for serious work, I would still have to go with JFLAP.)

The next chapter, "God is Slick", discusses Turing's hiatus at Princeton, where he had been sent by his advisor at Cambridge in order to pursue his work on computable numbers with Alonzo Church. At this time, Turing also dipped back into pure, rather than meta-mathematics, working on the Riemann hypothesis, but considering it in a mechanical way. This chapter is less technical, hence less frustrating.

The following chapter, "The Tender Peel", takes Turing to Bletchley Park. Again, it flounders in the technical detail, attempting some discussion but lacking the necessary precision. (The bit about Babbage's approach to the Vigeniere cipher is almost comprehensible.) But the chapter sets the stage effectively, and again leaves me wanting a more rigorous mathematical treatment. "the tender peel" is a quotation from the witch's song in the Disney film, "Sleeping Beauty". Turing takes a bite at the apple which will leave him a person of interest to the British government for the rest of his life.

In "The Electronic Athlete" Turing moves on from Bletchley Park and begins work on voice encryption and, at the National Physics Laboratory, the construction of the ACE computer. It is not really clear how much the ACE was real, and how Turing's ideas were really so different.

In "The Imitation Game" Turing moves to Manchester to work on a new machine with his former advisor, Newman. The chair of the department of neurosurgery at Manchester, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, gives a lecture preemptively refuting machine intelligence. The talk was humorous in parts, but smug in a way that would have gone over poorly with Turing, who, like Darwin, felt that the constant, implicit assumption that humans were superior because the qualities humans ascribe to themselves are the ones that they insist are the superior qualities, was boring and ignorant. Turing publishes his eerie "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper in the journal "Mind". This paper takes a tender and very sympathetic attitude toward machines. He continues to try to solve a variety of problems on his new machine: calculations to disprove the Riemann hypothesis but also, by one of his colleagues, a clever hack to make it play "God Save the King".

"Price's Buoy" is the endgame. Turing is elected to the Royal Society, becomes interested in morphogenesis, is arrested and charged with "gross indecency", writes a short story about his unfortunate experience, and dies. The general consensus is suicide, although some of his friends prefer to believe that the death is accidental. The author gives one paragraph to the possibility that the government might have decided to kill him off as a security threat, or rather to the fact that this possibility didn't seem to occur to anyone who knew him at that time.

Although it does fall down on the mathematical side, not only w/ the bad Turing machine but also with a bunch of typos in the discussion of Mersenne primes, and wanders off into the weeds with some of its mathematical explanation, this book is worth the read. It presents a coherent, individual, and sympathetic view of Turing's life. ( )

A very insightful novel, showing clearly how Turing thought and acted, as well as what he believed. Perhaps a bit cold in the description of personality and relationships, but clear and rather moving. I enjoyed the explanation of the concepts Turing was looking into. While I don't quite have the head for it, I would definitely re read this book in an effort to understand them better. The subject of Cryptanalysis is quite difficult, but the explanations are thorough. ( )

L'unico commento positivo che posso fare a questo libro ?¨ il desiderio di leggere un'altra biografia di Turing,magari quella scritta da Hodges.Pochissimi dettagli matematici,pochissimi approfondimenti filosofici,elementi biografici presentati come voci di corridoio.Per non parlare della traduzione che in alcuni passaggi lascia veramente a desiderare. ( )

Leavitt being a novelist I expected this to be a novel, but it is a biography. Moreover, most attention goes to Turings mathematical work instead of his life. Unfortunately the author tries to link Turings homosexuality to this work which is almost always unpausible, if not ridiculous. He saves his best one for the last sentence though! Turing seems to have had a weird sense of humour that entirely escapes Leavitt. ( )