Read Alan Turing's biography by Andrew Hodges

I am really enjoying this book. Andrew Hodges is such a good biographer. He understands lots of maths, so he is able to explain the intricate concepts of Alan Turing’s times.

Here is a quotation I find especially inspiring:

«If he [Alan Turing] had been a more conventional worker, he would not have attacked the Hilbert problem without having read up all the available literature, [...] then he might never have created the new idea of the logical machine with its simulation of ‘states of mind’, which not only closed the Hilbert problem but opened up quite new questions. It was the advantage and disadvantage of working as what Newman called ‘a confirmed solitary’. [...] he had been the Captain Scott of mathematics.»

Today Alan Turing would have been 100 years old. To celebrate it, I marked this day to start reading his biography (in fact, this was one of the reasons I wanted to finish reading the previous book earlier this week).

In fact, I am not the only one to celebrate this. There are lots of news in the media and Google celebrated with a nice Doodle, changing its logo for a Turing Machine-like game (as you can see here).

As a physicist, I am happy to see how a mathematician changed the world… and how the world celebrates it.