John L. Casti, Nature, March 18, 2004
Book Description
Written by a distinguished cast of contributors, this book is the definitive collection of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing. The volume spans the entire rich spectrum of his life, thoughts, and legacy, but also sheds some new light on the future of computing science with a chapter contributed by visionary Ray Kurzweil.
Further important contributions come from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, and the distinguished logician Martin Davis, who provides a first critical essay on an emerging and controversial field termed hypercomputation.
A special highlight of the book is the play by Valeria Patera that examines the scandal surrounding the last apple, and presents as an enigma, the life, death, and destiny of the man who did so much to decipher the Nazi enigma code during the Second World War. By contrast, deciphering the meaning of Alan's life remains much more difficult.
The book also contains a chapter on Turing's last, almost lost, somehow obscure, and ill-understood work on Fibonacci phyllotaxis, and a chapter on his almost forgotten connectionist ideas.
