The Turing Guide

Jack Copeland FRS NZ is Distinguished Professor in Arts at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he is Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. He has been script advisor and scientific consultant for a number of recent documentaries about Turing. Jack is Co-Director of the Turing Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, and also Honorary Research Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland, Australia. In 2012 he was Royden B. Davis Visiting Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and in 2015-16 was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Israel. A Londoner by birth, he earned a D.Phil. in mathematical logic from the University of Oxford, where he was taught by Turing's great friend Robin Gandy.Robin Wilson is an Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, UK, and of Geometry at Gresham College, London. After graduating from Oxford, he received his Ph.D. degree in number theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He has written and co-edited many books on graph theory and the history of mathematics, including Four Colors Suffice and Combinatorics: Ancient & Modern. His historical research interests include British mathematics and the history of graph theory and combinatorics, and he has been President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. An enthusiastic popularizer of mathematics, he won two awards for expository writing from the Mathematical Association of America. Mark Sprevak is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His primary research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, with particular focus on the cognitive sciences. He has published articles in, among other places, The Journal of Philosophy, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. His book The Computational Mind is forthcoming from Routledge.Jonathan P. Bowen FBCS FRSA is Emeritus Professor of Computing at London South Bank University, where he established and headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods in 2000. During 2013-15 he was Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham City University. Previously he was a lecturer at the University of Reading, a senior researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory's Programming Research Group, and a research assistant at Imperial College, London. Since 1977 he has been involved with the field of computing in both academia and industry. His books include: Formal Specification and Documentation using Z; High-Integrity System Specification and Design; Formal Methods: State of the Art and New Directions; and Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture.

The Turing Guide has opened up a universe of Turing's other pursuits I knew nothing about, inflating my admiration for him and his work by several orders of magnitude. I doubt that there exists a more complete book about Turing's life and work. A towering figure in the history of computing, but also in history itself, we come to know Turing with a completeness unattained by any preceding work.

• BIOGRAPHY; THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE AND BEYOND; CODEBREAKER; COMPUTERS AFTER THE WAR; ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE MIND; BIOLOGICAL GROWTH; MATHEMATICS; FINALE