Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist?
As the history of the 20th century slowly gets set, like a resin that takes years to harden, one of its truly seminal figures is turning out to be Alan Turing. For example, the highest honor in the field of computing—its Nobel Prize, if you will—is the Turing Prize, for the man credited with inventing the modern computer.
Turing also single-handedly invented the field of artificial intelligence with a 1950 journal article that’s still read by philosophers. And he’s been recognized as having made probably the single greatest civilian contribution to the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II, by leading the code breaking of German ciphers.
This June, the world will mark the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth with tributes of various sorts, magazine stories, journal articles, and at one time it looked like there was even going to be a biographical movie that was to star Leonardo DiCaprio, though it still hasn’t gone into production.
Most all of them, including the biopic, will rely on a single, definitive source, a 587-page biography titled Alan Turing: The Enigma, written by Andrew Hodges. The book, which is at once a mathematical, scholarly, and literary tour de force, was originally published in 1983 by Simon & Schuster, but a new centenary edition is coming out next month from Princeton University Press, with a new forward by Douglas Hofstadter.
Andrew Hodges is a tutorial fellow in mathematics at Oxford University’s Wadham College. He has a distinguished career in his own right as a mathematical physicist specializing in the study of space-time, but three decades ago he took two years out of his life to write Turing’s biography, and now I suspect almost as large a chunk is being giving over to the centenary. We’re fortunate in having him as our guest today; he joins us by phone from Oxford.