He had plans and ideas his work was going well.

He was not in disgrace or financial difficulty. Yet he had not been despondent over his legal problems. On June 7, 1954, he was found dead in his home near Manchester, a bitten, presumably cyanide-laced apple in his hand. In February 1952, he was arrested, tried, convicted and given a probationary sentence for ''Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,'' or the practice of male homosexuality, a ''tendency'' he had never denied and in recent years had admitted quite openly. He was not yet 40.īut the next half-decade interval did not bring further revelation.

In 1951, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Hodges points out, his waves of inspiration seemed to flow in five-year intervals - the Naval Enigma in 1940, the design for his Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) in 1945, a theory of structural evolution, or morphogenesis, in 1950. By the time he was 24 years old, in 1936, he had conceived as a mathematical abstraction his computing machine and completed the paper ''Computable Numbers,'' which offered it to the world. Yet the mind of the man was an awesome force. Hodges offers us in his book - Turing as an eccentrically unruly child who could keep neither his buttons aligned nor the ink in his pen, and who answered his father when asked if he would be good, ''Yes, but sometimes I shall forget!'' or Turing as an intense young man with a breathless high-pitched voice and a hiccuppy laugh - and it is difficult to think of him as a dark umlauted enigma. Look at any of the many verbal snapshots that Mr. HE is remembered variously as the British cryptologist whose so-called ''Enigma'' machine helped to decipher Germany's top-secret World War II code as the difficult man who both pioneered and impeded the advance of England's computer industry and as the inventor of a theoretical automaton sometimes called the ''T'uring Machine,'' the umlaut being, according to a glossary published in 1953, ''an unearned and undesirable addition, due, presumably, to an impression that anything so incomprehensible must be Teutonic.''īut this passionately exhaustive biography by Andrew Hodges, an English mathematician, brings Alan Turing very much back to life and offers a less forbidding impression.

Alan turing book