Alan Turing book

[Aerodyne]

I noticed a thread here about the possibility of the new £50 note being adorned with an image of Alan Turing. This prompts me to mention that I've just competed reading 'Alan Turing The Enigma Man' by Nigel Cawthorne. I mention this for three reasons: 1, the book was only £2 from The Works 2. Turing's life is fascinating 3. The book is well written, concise and entirely to the point (warts and all). As an aside, it throws into doubt his 'suicide' and suggests an alternative. Tommy Flowers is given full recognition too.
In short, a good read and well worth the price.

Tony

[Mike Watterson]

It might even have been accidental. His chemistry experiments.

[Aerodyne]

True, Mike. The book also suggests that as a possibility!

Tony

[ppppenguin]

There's a new(er) edition of Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing. I have the original edition. Essential reading.
https://www.turing.org.uk/book/

There's also a book by AT's nephew: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Story-How-...1563270830&refinements=p_27%3ADermot+Turing&s=books&sr=1-1
This has had decent independent (ie not Amazon) reviews: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/article...ot-turing/

Went to the GCHQ exhibition at the Science Museum yesterday. Rather disappointed. For the stuff up to and including WW2 the story is told rather patchy way and some artifacts are very badly displayed. For example a very rare 4 wheel Abwehr Enigma, placed far too hihg for most to see and with no explanation. Though it was good to see what was described as a Polish copy of the Enigma with an ABC keybaord. Not seen that before anywhere.

For the WW2 era you are much better off going to TNMOC : https://www.tnmoc.org/ More so than the main Bletchley Park. Coing back to GCHQ at the SciM. Some interesting stuff about the Krogers and Zircon but that's about it. Obviously GCHQ can't say too much about newer work but I think they've missed a few tricks here. Notably the history of public key cryptography, something that was secretly invented at GCHQ (and not exploited) before Rivest, Shamir, Adelmann, Diffie and Hellman all did their famous work.

The exhibition is free but you need to book a timed ticket online.