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Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing
Hardbound.
- GenresScienceNonfiction
168 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1992
About the author
Alan M. Turing
46 books261 followersWorks of British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing explored the possibility of computers and raised fundamental questions about artificial intelligence; during World War II, he helped to decipher the German enigma codes and thus contributed to the Allied victory.
This highly influential English logician, cryptanalyst, and scientist developed and provided a formalization of the concept of "algorithm" with the eponymous machine, which played a significant role in the modern creation. People widely considered this father.
Turing worked for the government code and cypher school at Bletchley park, code-breaking center of Britain. For a time, he headed hut 8, the responsible naval section. He devised a number of techniques, including the method of the "bombe," an electromechanical machine that ably found settings, for breaking ciphers. After the war, he worked at the national physical laboratory and created the ACE of the first designs for a stored program.
Biology interested Turing towards the end of his life.
He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating reactions, such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky, first observed in the 1960s.
Still illegal homosexual acts of Turing resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952 in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. From cyanide poisoning, he died several weeks before his forty-second birthday. An inquest determined suicide; his mother and some other persons thought of his accidental death.
Following an Internet campaign, Gordon Brown, prime minister of Britain, on 10 September 2009 made an official public apology on behalf of the government for the postwar treatment of Turing.
This highly influential English logician, cryptanalyst, and scientist developed and provided a formalization of the concept of "algorithm" with the eponymous machine, which played a significant role in the modern creation. People widely considered this father.
Turing worked for the government code and cypher school at Bletchley park, code-breaking center of Britain. For a time, he headed hut 8, the responsible naval section. He devised a number of techniques, including the method of the "bombe," an electromechanical machine that ably found settings, for breaking ciphers. After the war, he worked at the national physical laboratory and created the ACE of the first designs for a stored program.
Biology interested Turing towards the end of his life.
He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating reactions, such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky, first observed in the 1960s.
Still illegal homosexual acts of Turing resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952 in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. From cyanide poisoning, he died several weeks before his forty-second birthday. An inquest determined suicide; his mother and some other persons thought of his accidental death.
Following an Internet campaign, Gordon Brown, prime minister of Britain, on 10 September 2009 made an official public apology on behalf of the government for the postwar treatment of Turing.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 4, 2023
What a trip. From a mind-blowing paper on morphogenesis that completely changes the way I look at plants and other more simple life(especially flowering plants), to some serious thought of diffusion problems in the development of phylotaxis...there's a lot going on in this relatively short book.
I felt that while each line of reasoning sounded plausible and there wasn't anything that was *really* a surprise in terms of notation/mathematical concepts (and where there was stuff that was unfamilliar, like the Legendre polynomials, Saint Turing usually took time to explain himself ) in terms of what he was doing in his manipulation of his equations, some of the rationale for *why* he was doing what he was doing was clearly and definitely above me. I feel like this is, like his other works, immediately valuable but would become more valuable if the reader had more 'hooks' to understand the significance of what he's saying - ie it's a well thought through little set of papers.
I'm going to be thinking of the contents of this book for a long time, I suspect.
I felt that while each line of reasoning sounded plausible and there wasn't anything that was *really* a surprise in terms of notation/mathematical concepts (and where there was stuff that was unfamilliar, like the Legendre polynomials, Saint Turing usually took time to explain himself ) in terms of what he was doing in his manipulation of his equations, some of the rationale for *why* he was doing what he was doing was clearly and definitely above me. I feel like this is, like his other works, immediately valuable but would become more valuable if the reader had more 'hooks' to understand the significance of what he's saying - ie it's a well thought through little set of papers.
I'm going to be thinking of the contents of this book for a long time, I suspect.
Displaying 1 of 1 review