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Turing
Book

Turing

Pioneer of the Information Age

B. Jack Copeland
Oxford UP, 2013

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Although it has taken decades, Alan Turing – the brilliant British mathematician, logician, World War II code breaker, computer scientist and theoretician of artificial intelligence and artificial life – has finally achieved his deserved recognition as the true father of the computer. Computer historian B. Jack Copeland details Turing’s colorful, tragic life and incredible accomplishments, portraying the awkward, eccentric scientist as an archetypal, quirky British intellectual. getAbstract recommends Copeland’s masterful telling of Turing’s astonishing life to those interested in computers, WWII, code-breaking, espionage, artificial intelligence and the political history of gay oppression.

Take-Aways

  • British scientist Alan Turing (1912-1954) was the father of today’s computer and of artificial intelligence (AI).
  • The universal Turing machine proved to be the first vital step to the modern computer.
  • His paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” is the bedrock document of computer science.

About the Author

B. Jack Copeland, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, is the director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

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