Alan M. Turing (first published 1959) by Sara Turing
English mathematician, logician,
cryptographer (code-breaker), and founder of computer science, Alan Mathison
Turing, has not doubted a genius! I came to know about this man when I browsed
through Walter Isaacson’s latest book The
Innovators (2014), a story of the people who created the computer and the
Internet that included Alan Turing as one of the leading thinkers that created
our current digital revolution. Then I have introduced again to Alan’s life in a
movie The Imitation Games (2014) loosely
based on the biography Alan Turing: The
Enigma by Andrew Hodges [Benedict Cumberbatch a.k.a. Marvel’s Dr. Strange!]. So, when I
found this book in the library, I straightaway borrow it!
This is a 2012 Centenary
Edition. Sara Turing, the author, is Alan Turing’s mother. Alan is her younger
son, and John Turing is her eldest son. “Sara
Turing,” comments Martin Davis in the forward, “failed to understand [Alan] on so many levels, wrote this remarkable
biographical essay. She carefully pieced together his school reports, copies of
his publications, and comments on his achievements by experts.” To me this
book is a bit bias, I can feel it as I read it – mother’s touch is always
kinder – and I agreed that “she was
trying to fit [Alan] into a framework that reveals more about her and her
social situation than it does about him.” Alan’s brother, John, wrote in the
afterward can only be described as a rebuttal of his mother's account. Sara is so
optimistic about Alan; John thinks otherwise. Sara tried to make Alan look excellent
and friendly, but John said that he was a bit weird and absent-minded.
Nevertheless, Sara
Turing’s aim for this book is precise; it’s not about exhausting detail accounts but
“to trace from early days the development
of a mathematician and scientist of great originality.”
Highlights about Alan M.
Turing: As a child, he was very energetic, intelligent, very good with words,
adventurous, love sports, curious, and had his lab to do experiments. He
studied at Cambridge and then Princeton. During World War II, he worked in
the Foreign Office (where he and other code-breakers cracked German ‘Enigma’
code). After the War, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory Teddington,
and also with the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine. In 1937, Alan published
the paper On Computable Numbers, which, as much as any single event can be seen as the start of the modern computer age
(where his proposed ‘The Turing Machine’).
He published another paper Computing
Machinery and Intelligence in 1950, which introduced his famous the ‘Turing Test.’ The test continues to play
a big part in debates about Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Sadly, Turing died at 41.
Sara thought of his death as ‘an accident.’ She writes, “Many friends, either because of his temperament and recent good
spirits… have been led to believe that his death was caused by some
unaccountable misadventure. Besides, his inadvertence alone had always involved
the risk of an accident.” But Martin Davis and John Turing suspected
otherwise. Martin writes, “There is a
reason to believe that Alan did take his life” by staged suicide, biting a
“deadly cyanide apple.” Very likely,
this version is more accurate. In memory of her son’s death and significant accomplishments,
she endowed the Alan Turing Prize of
Science to be awarded annually at Sherborne School.
[P.s: Alan Turing is
thought to have committed suicide shortly after his conviction for a homosexual
offense, still criminalized at the time. His mother may or may not know of
this, and she doesn’t record it clearly in her biography. “I believe it was here, perhaps in the first four or five years at the
Wards, perhaps even in the first two,” John Turing recalled, “that Alan became destined for a homosexual.”]
THINK BIG.
START SMALL. GO DEEP.
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