Andrew Hodges

Following hot on the heels of The Imitation Game, this is the first modern biography of Alan Turing by a member of the family—Alan’s nephew, Sir Dermot Turing. Alan Turing was an extraordinary man who crammed into a life of only 42 years the careers of mathematician, codebreaker, computer scientist, and biologist. He is widely regarded as a war hero grossly mistreated by his unappreciative country and it has become hard to disentangle the real man from the story. It is easy to cast him as a misfit, the stereotypical professor. But actually Alan Turing was never a professor, and his nickname "Prof" was given by his codebreaking friends at Bletchley Park. Now, Alan Turing’s nephew, Dermot Turing, has taken a fresh look at the influences on Alan Turing’s life and creativity, and the later creation of a legend. Dermot’s vibrant and entertaining approach to the life and work of a true genius makes this a fascinating read. This unique family perspective features insights from secret documents only recently released to the UK National Archives and other sources not tapped by previous biographers, looks into the truth behind Alan’s conviction for gross indecency, and includes previously unpublished photographs from the Turing family album.

"Alan Turing (1912-1954) made seminal contributions to mathematical logic, computation, computer science, artificial intelligence, cryptography and theoretical biology. In this volume, outstanding scientific thinkers take a fresh look at the great range of Turing's contributions, on how the subjects have developed since his time, and how they might develop still further. The contributors include Martin Davis, J. M. E. Hyland, Andrew R. Booker, Ueli Maurer, Kanti V. Mardia, S. Barry Cooper, Stephen Wolfram, Christof Teuscher, Douglas Richard Hofstadter, Philip K. Maini, Thomas E. Woolley, Eamonn A. Gaffney, Ruth E. Baker, Richard Gordon, Stuart Kauffman, Scott Aaronson, Solomon Feferman, P. D. Welch and Roger Penrose. These specially commissioned essays will provoke and engross the reader who wishes to understand better the lasting significance of one of the twentieth century's deepest thinkers."--Amazon.com.

Andrew Hodges, author of the acclaimed biography Alan Turing: the Enigma, brings numbers to three-dimensional life in this delightful and illuminating volume. Filled with illustrations and entertaining puzzles, One to Nine makes even the most challenging math problems accessible to the layperson. Starting with the puzzling unity of one and ending with the infinite nature of nine, One to Nine explores literature, philosophy, and the quirks of history in a pithy book that tackles mathematical conundrums from the ancient Greeks to superstring theory. Using pop culture to begin his discussion of each number, Hodges takes us from the elegant symmetry of two to the Indo-European roots and sexual nature of six (did you know that six is sex, and in soixante-neuf, even the number is erotic?), To the number nine, which, since it comes last, inevitably spells doom (as in Mahler's and Bruckner's failure to finish their ninth symphonies or to the question of on ending infinites). Inspired by millennia of human attempts to figure things out, One to Nine provides, among other tantalizing facts, charming revelations about the selfishness of sunflowers and the mystic origins of magical squares, while also examining the intricacies of the Fibonacci sequence, the nature of Jesus' Y chromosome, and the origins of computing. Filled with puzzles for every level of mathematical aptitude, rated from easy to fiendish, and including a new, massive Sudoku puzzle, One to Nine is a book that engages and challenges, "making the unfathomable enticing and giving the reader tremendous motivation to explore further" (Daily Telegraph). In the vast range of Hodges's book, few mathematical ideas and problems are left unexplored. - Jacket flap.