Alan Turing

Book excerpt: Spring 1940: The Battle of the Atlantic rages. Vulnerable merchant convoys are at the mercy of German U-boats controlled by a cunning system of coded messages created by a machine called Enigma. Only one man believes that these codes can be broken - mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Winston Churchill later described Turing's success in breaking the Enigma codes as the single biggest contribution to victory against Nazi Germany. Unheralded during his lifetime, Turing is now recognized as the father of modern computer science and as possessing one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Drawing on original source material, interviews and photographs, this book explores Turing's groundbreaking work as well as revealing the private side of a complex and unlikely national hero.