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Alan Turing
- Unlocking The Enigma
- Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
- Length: 2 hrs and 3 mins
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Publisher's summary
Alan Mathison Turing. Mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, a founder of computer science, and the father of Artificial Intelligence, Turing was one of the most original thinkers of the last century - and the man whose work helped create the computer-driven world we now inhabit.
But he was also an enigmatic figure, deeply reticent yet also strikingly naive. Turing's openness about his homosexuality at a time when it was an imprisonable offense ultimately led to his untimely death at the age of only 41.
In Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma, David Boyle reveals the mysteries behind the man and his remarkable career. Aged just 22, Turing was elected a fellow at King's College, Cambridge on the strength of a dissertation in which he proved the central limit theorem. By the age of 33, he had been awarded the OBE by King George VI for his wartime services: Turing was instrumental in cracking the Nazi Enigma machines at the top secret code breaking establishment at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
But his achievements were to be tragically overshadowed by the paranoia of the post-War years. Hounded for his supposedly subversive views and for his sexuality, Turing was prosecuted in 1952, and forced to accept the humiliation of hormone treatment to avoid a prison sentence. Just two years later, at the age of 41 he was dead. The verdict: cyanide poisoning.
Was Turing's death accidental as his mother always claimed? Or did persistent persecution drive him to take him own life?
Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma seeks to find the man behind the science, illuminating the life of a person who is still a shadowy presence behind his brilliant achievements.
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Outstanding in every way!
- By Grace O'Malley on 07-18-22
By: Henry Hemming
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American Sketches
- Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Cotter Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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The Strangest Man
- The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrated by: B. J. Harrison
- Length: 19 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Dirac was among the great scientific geniuses of the modern age. One of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, the most revolutionary theory of the past century, his contributions had a unique insight, eloquence, clarity, and mathematical power. His prediction of antimatter was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of physics.
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Excellent biography of great physicist
- By Eileen on 05-09-13
By: Graham Farmelo
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Existentialism and Excess
- The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre
- By: Gary Cox
- Narrated by: Matt Addis
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the undisputed giants of 20th-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism, combined with his creative and artistic flair, have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high-profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion.
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a capitalista biography of Sartre
- By Anonymous User on 01-24-20
By: Gary Cox
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Would You Kill the Fat Man?
- By: David Edmonds
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A train is racing toward five men, tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. If a fat man is pushed onto the line, although he will die, his body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? As David Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex, and important, than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.
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Wonderfully Rendered Book...
- By Douglas on 01-25-14
By: David Edmonds
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Brief Candle in the Dark
- My Life in Science
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In this hugely entertaining sequel to the New York Times best-selling memoir An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins delves deeply into his intellectual life spent kick-starting new conversations about science, culture, and religion and writing yet another of the most audacious and widely read books of the 20th century - The God Delusion.
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I'm a Dawkins Groupie but...
- By Anne on 10-18-15
By: Richard Dawkins
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Shortcut
- How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Analogies are far more complex than their SAT stereotype and lie at the very core of human cognition and creativity. Once we become aware of this, we start seeing them everywhere - in ads, apps, political debates, legal arguments, logos, and euphemisms, to name just a few. At their very best, analogies inspire new ways of thinking, enable invention, and motivate people to action. Unfortunately, not every analogy that rings true is true. That's why, at their worst, analogies can deceive, manipulate, or mislead us into disaster.
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Analogies???
- By Frederick on 08-16-15
By: John Pollack
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The Theory That Would Not Die
- How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
- By: Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.
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Who is the intended audience?
- By Billy on 07-21-14
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The Immortal Game
- A History of Chess
- By: David Shenk
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Why has one game, alone among the thousands of games invented and played throughout human history, not only survived but thrived within every culture it has touched? What is it about its 32 figurative pieces, moving about its 64 black and white squares according to very simple rules, that has captivated people for nearly 1,500 years? Why has it driven some of its greatest players into paranoia and madness, and yet is hailed as a remarkably powerful intellectual tool?
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Buy in print
- By Ivy Reisner on 08-30-11
By: David Shenk
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The Woman Who Smashed Codes
- A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
- By: Jason Fagone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 13 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1912, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the US government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the Adam and Eve of the NSA, Elizebeth's story, incredibly, has never been told.
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Captivating Biography
- By Jean on 11-20-17
By: Jason Fagone
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The Riddle of the Labyrinth
- The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
- By: Margalit Fox
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.
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Discovery and Translation of Linear B Script
- By Sires on 01-11-14
By: Margalit Fox
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Churchill's Bomb
- How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the bomb's strategic implications.
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Loved it!! This was great.
- By MAC24211 on 09-08-21
By: Graham Farmelo
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According to Winston Churchill, Alan Turing made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory over Nazi Germany with his code-breaking machine. The world is also indebted to Turing's genius for the modern computer. It was clear that Turing had a remarkable mind from an early age. He taught himself to read in just three weeks. At his first school, the headmistress said, "I have had clever and hardworking boys, but Alan has genius."
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Alan Turing Bio
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- Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
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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.
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First Audible Book I Returned
- By Rush D. Austin on 07-17-14
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In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses - led by John von Neumann - gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results....
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Needed an editor
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Alan Turing had a radical and ingenious mind. He is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and his theories on this matter range from purely mechanical to almost spiritual. During World War II, his decryption of the Nazis’ Enigma codes proved vital for the Allied victory over the Axis powers. Turing’s fingerprints are everywhere, and yet his own country for quite some time failed to acknowledge it.
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Alan Turing: The Life and Legacy of the English Computer Scientist Who Became World War II’s Most Famous Codebreaker looks at the life of one of World War II’s unsung heroes. You will learn about Alan Turing like never before.
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Thoughtful and informative
- By SonJa on 06-23-24
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Alan Turing
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We Have All Bern Misfits
- By James Carl Barsz, MD on 05-24-16
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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.
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Alan Turing Bio
- By G. Elliot on 01-08-19
By: Dermot Turing
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The Man Who Knew Too Much
- Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
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- Narrated by: Richard Powers
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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.
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First Audible Book I Returned
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In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses - led by John von Neumann - gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results....
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Needed an editor
- By Monte Johnston on 03-12-12
By: George Dyson
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Alan Turing
- A Life From Beginning to End (World War 2 Biographies, Book 7)
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Overall
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Alan Turing had a radical and ingenious mind. He is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and his theories on this matter range from purely mechanical to almost spiritual. During World War II, his decryption of the Nazis’ Enigma codes proved vital for the Allied victory over the Axis powers. Turing’s fingerprints are everywhere, and yet his own country for quite some time failed to acknowledge it.
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Thoughtful and informative
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What listeners say about Alan Turing
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Marty McDonough
- 12-26-20
Thank you
I appreciate this short and informative education on a great person who helped make our world a better place.
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- MolllyT
- 09-14-17
Both the machine and the man
science, mathematics, computing, biography
The only thing that I knew about Alan Turing before this book was a few things about his role in cracking the Enigma Code in WW2. This limited biography explores his role in advancing the computer sciences and development of A I. There is also detailing of his being persecuted by his own government because of his homosexuality.
Barnaby Edwards is very good as narrator.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Thomas Le Min
- 12-20-22
Superb
This presents a concise overview of Turing’s life and work while maintaining a personal touch as regards the aspect of his sexuality.
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- Mihai-Tudor Popescu
- 05-02-23
Average
The Book treats Turing’s live pretty shallowly, it goes through it pretty fast and just drops names. Not even the homosexuality and the difficulties it posed at that time is approached very deeply. It just seems to be like a long press article about Turing and Enigma for people with average education. (A bit better than “The Sun”’s articles though, but not very much.
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- David D. Schneider
- 03-08-15
Turing From 30,000 Feet! 😱
Just saw the movie and enjoyed it very much.
The movie, while very appealing as an engrossing story took considerable liberty with its portrayal of Turing the man, choosing to emphasize the persecution of Turing the homosexual.
While as a physician I am uncomfortable with the idea of chemical castration as a criminal punishment, I certainly have many patients who have had "chemical castration" as a part of their treatment for prostate cancer. No such symptoms as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Immitation Game" occur in my patients. The symptoms of Turing the actor are consistent with those of a man under extreme duress and in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Perhaps in this case a distinction without a difference. 😱
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2 people found this helpful
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- Bruce Cline
- 01-03-22
Insight
While the unsolvable enigma of Alan Turing persists, this is an interesting look at Turing the person: his work, sexuality, introversion, quirks, and habits. It’s so sad that societal repression of people who are different continues unabated, with no end of discrimination in sight. Turing’s enormous talents were exploited, but in the end they could not protect him.
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- Reader
- 07-02-15
Great book
What made the experience of listening to Alan Turing the most enjoyable?
Everything. Informative. Entertaining.
What other book might you compare Alan Turing to and why?
I can't think of any right now.
What about Barnaby Edwards’s performance did you like?
Very-well read.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes.
Any additional comments?
A wonderful book if you have any interests in technology and/or gay rights.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Gareth
- 06-21-21
There will always be question
Amazing story. Why was the apple never checked for poison? Did the intelligence not want to know how he died?
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- Anonymous User
- 08-09-22
Interesting overview
Interesting overview but somewhat shallow story of Alan Turing. Would have been so much more if the story covered the “life” and “ times” of Alan Turing. Instead the story put put too much emphasis on the “Turing Model” or “Tiring Method” without making it overly clear, on a simple and easy to grasp, basis. I suppose more reading or research is needed in order to filly appreciate and understand the brilliance and intelligence of this giant of a code breaker and computer pioneer.
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- kwestrope
- 10-16-18
Fascinating look at a fascinating man
I’d been hearing Turing’s name a lot since the release of the movie, The Imitation Game, but I really didn’t know much about him. That changed after reading this book. Though it is not very long, it is a wonderfully in depth look at a fascinating man. Very well-written and presented.
I listened to the audio version and the narrator, Barnaby Edwards, did such a fantastic job. He made it even more interesting. If you are a history buff, particularly regarding the history and early development of computers, I think you will enjoy this book.
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2 people found this helpful