Bookraft

You know the old adage the more you know, the more you know that you don't know - well that summarizes the book The Man Who Knew Too Much to a Universal T.

Universal Ts are shorthand for Universal Turing Tape Machines, the ingenious mindworks of Alan Turing, the very brilliant British mathematician, logician and tinkerer, tailor, Enigma spy-code breaker. And to understand things from M.Leavitt - Turing was somewhat of a recluse, slovenly, an ill-suited dresser, and to make things worse, gay in spite of these homo-contrarian social shortcomings. In short, the description and discussion of the very deep math (Godel's Theorem on Completeness and Consistency in Mathematical Axiomatic Systems plus the EntscheidungsProblem on Decidability in Logic and Mathematical Analysis - Turing's tour de force mathematical results) is quite good; but the exploration of the man, Alan Turing, is occasionally brilliant but mostly a mash up of Psych 101, Psychology Today and Hail Mary. I can say without a doubt, after reading this book: "Alan Turing, we still barely know ye ". Q.E.D.