The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Great Discoveries) | 
 enlarge | Author: David Leavitt
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 296232
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0393329097
Dewey Decimal Number: 509
EAN: 9780393329094
ASIN: 0393329097
Publication Date: November 20, 2006
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Product Description
A "skillful and literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.
To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.
With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity—his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor—and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 The Most Helpful Discussion of What Turing Machines Do (from Ahadada Books) May 7, 2008
If this book were instead a photograph of the subject, I would imagine Man Ray being the photographer, with the young Turing posed in such a manner that deep shadows are raked across his features. We have patches of pure light in this book--for instance in the author's explanation of exactly what Turing Machines do and how they do it, which I found to be one of the best sections of the book, and then we have the other parts which are handled well fact-wise, but without much of an imparting of the character of the subject. Leavitt tells us several times that Turing indeed had the ability not to impress himself upon his teachers and his colleagues, and perhaps was simply carrying over the biographical fact into the writing. These are the shadowy sections of the portrait we posit in which Turing seems to recede in favor of passages from E.M. Forster or of Leavitt's own interpretations of the possible psychological underpinnings of certain of Turing's ideas regarding intelligent machines. In these darknesses we see that Turing was close to his mother, yet this information is left tantalizingly vague. We get flashes of Turing's rather cruel sense of pedagogy, but this too is dropped into the murk. The central metaphor of "loss" in this tragedy is Turing's relationship with Christopher Morcom, the gifted young man whose early death stood as a kind of absolute in the genius' thought, yet that central experience is not delved into but remains ambiguously described, though it provides the frisson--the startling sense of closure--in the final sentence of the book. The "cracker jack prize" I was hoping to find buried in The Man Who Knew Too Much--an illumination of Wittgenstein's relationship with Turing--was missing. We see him sitting a bit like a rabbit stunned in the intense glare of the philosopher's regard, reiterating his mathematician's sense of the consequence of contradictions in closed systems, but we are left only with that. In short, this is an interesting picture to hang on the wall and contemplate, and a useful one in parts, but one that strikes this reader as being curiously incomplete, shadowy, and in many places--inert. Still, this is a good book and one that's worth a read.
 Easy read for the most part November 4, 2007
I considered writing a bad review of this book some time back, but I finally compelled myself to finish reading the whole thing, and I have to redact my original thoughts that this work needed some help.
While it is true that unless you have taken a class in automata theory, you may get lost about half way through this book, it is well worth completing in order to come to grips with the whole story that encompasses Mr. Turing.
While true, Leavitt focuses on a primarily homosexual perspective of Turing, it does provide an alternative look at the man. I do feel that at times more than ample creative license was taken in this regard and wished that more attention might have been in critical analysis of Turing's personal papers which led Leavitt to these conclusions. Given that Leavitt takes such considerable pains to explain the context within which Turing's mathematical process took place, describing those around him, professors he did not even associate with... on and on, this seemed a bit odd and out of place with the rest of the story.
Anyway, I am glad I read it only for the references to other books that I have started to enjoy, including both Alan's mother's biography and the Enigma by Hodges.
I would also recommend to others who enjoy Turing history to look into BBC4's video, "Dangerous Thoughts". You can find it on google videos.
Somewhere in Here is a Biography July 13, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Leavitt spent a lot of time teaching himself mathematics and learning the early science of how computers worked. The problem is that he spends half the book going over the theorems of Turning and some of his contemporaries. This is all fine and good, if math is your thing. Zeta probabilities and the function of (prime numbers at n-1 or something like that) have no interest for the average laymen; and especially for those of us who never got past algebra and think calculus is hard skin on the bottom of your foot.
This makes the title sort of a double entendre, leaving all of us at the short end of the stick because if he learned it, he told it to us. Some of the explanations run eight or ten pages. This of course makes reading this short book (under 300 pages) even shorter, though it's like hitting yourself in the head, it only feels great when it's over. If your a good skimmer and know where to look it's probably an enjoyable book. In my case I kept hoping that it would get more interesting but it never did.
More on Turing's life (or maybe there just wasn't any more) would have been preferable to more on his mathematical findings.
not a bad airplane read July 12, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Not bad over all, at times goes on a bit to much about his homosexuality. Main reason for 3 and not 4 stars is the title, nothing in the book deals how he "knew too much".
The Essential Turing Reading June 11, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
All students studying computer science are introduced to Alan Turing at one time or another. For most, this introduction takes the form of Turing as the inventor of the Turing Machine, a machine unbounded by time and memory that can solve any problem. Once the students perform some perfunctory exercises involving the use of a Turing machine to construct say, the solution to the dining philosophers problem, they promptly forget about Turing and his machine. Which is so sad. Turing can be rightly considered the father of the modern computer where data and memory are mapped to the same address space. This invention is typically attributed to John von Neumann, but the author of the book makes a point that behind von Neumann's contribution was Turing's hand. Turing went on, in his brief life spanning only 42 years, to work on cryptography (credited with decoding the German Enigma machines in World War II, albeit using the groundwork laid down by a Polish cryptographer, Martin Rejewski; see Simon Singh's Code Book reviewed in 2006), artificial intelligence (the Turing Test), and mathematics. The state saw to it that his genius would be, unfortunately, eclipsed by his sexuality. In 1952, Turing was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" after admitting sexual relations with a man. He was forced to undergo hormone therapy in the vain hope of "curing" him. Instead, what these pogroms did was to rob the scientific world of one of the greatest researchers of all times. Turing elected to end his life by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. It was apropos; his favorite fairy tale was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
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