Review: The Annotated Turing

December 30, 2009

I finally finished reading The Annotated Turing. Two enthusiastic thumbs up. The Annotated Turing’s focus is on explaining Turing’s famous 36 page work which many consider to be the beginning of computing. I would have been hopelessly lost here without the annotations, and even then, I didn’t let myself get hung up on the math or I’d still be reading. It’s the theory that Turing was positing that I found compelling and the author, Charles Petzold explains the theory nicely.

But what I really loved about the book was the first section of the book that essentially introduces number theory to the reader. Mr. Petzold should be a teacher. The story of math is an intriguing one, and in the author’s hands, not only are the actors compelling, but the math itself is as well.

Every generation tends to over-emphasize the change going on as the ‘greatest ever’, but in reading this book, I had a greater appreciation for the amazing changes in math in the first half of hte 20th century.

If you are interested in Turing, computing, or looking for a great primer on math history and number theory, I strongly recommend this book.

UPDATE: thanks to a @lwcavallucci on twitter who asked a very common sense question (that I failed to supply an answer for in my post).  The question is on age appropriateness.  My first answer is that is has more to do with interest than age, but think I can go deeper than that.

1. For the actual math done in Turing’s paper, there is a high degree of difficulty and it was way over my head.  That said, this did not stop me from enjoying the book or understand the theory behind the math, and the whole point of the book is to annotate the paper.

2. For the other elements of the book, i.e. number theory, history of math especially around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, I would say a middle schooler who enjoys math will like the book.  (Editorial: I find number theory fascinating and I it is puzzling to me why the American style of teaching math puts that off for so long, when for many students, math would be far more interesting if they could take this earlier in life, and not associate Math purely with “arithmetic.”)

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