Anyone writing a book that has anything to do with Alan Turing (such as my book The Annotated Turing ) benefits from having at the outset a valuable and ultimately indispensable resource: Andrew Hodges' extraordinary biography Alan Turing: The Enigma published in Great Britain and the United States in 1983. This biography is a model of its kind: very well researched, beautifully written, accurately informative about the mathematics, and quite moving. My book The Annotated Turing is certainly not another biography of Turing, but rather an extended discussion of his 1936 paper that introduced the concepts of computability and the Turing Machine. However, in Chapters 4 through 11, I attempt to interweave biographical information about Turing with my presentation and discussion of the first 22 pages of Turing's paper. (It was one of the very fun challenges of writing these chapters to make chronological connections between Turing's post-1936 life and various sections of the paper without overstrained Read More...