Alan Turing has become such a cultural icon (with a major Hollywood biopic ensuring that even your average moviegoer is reasonably conversant with his name) that it is hard to think of a time when this wasn't the case. And yet less than three decades ago, when I first encountered Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing [1] in the local British Council library, I recall myself marveling that someone would write such a massive biography about "the guy whose name is associated with that machine that's there in all the computer science books" (as one of my friends put it). Curious as to what the book had to say about Turing, 1 borrowed it and spent the next few weeks being (in turn) astounded by his genius as a mathematician/logician/cryptographer, fascinated by his prescient contributions to artificial intelligence (AI) and pattern formation, and finally indignant at how state persecution finally led to his untimely death. By the time I finished the book, this tragic figure had become one of my intellectual heroes (and remains one to this day). While Hodges’ excellent book had woken the world to the fact that Turing was much more than just someone who had lent his name to a theoretical concept in computer science, it was (as it turned out) just the beginning of what has by now become a veritable deluge of books, papers, and conference proceedings that aim to either bring to light one or more hitherto unknown contributions of Turing or to discuss how his contributions have shaped recent developments in any number of areas. With such a large amount of information about Turing already available in print, one can ask what new contribution one more book on Turing can make.
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