The Man Who Knew Too Much

Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

De: David Leavitt

Narrado por: Richard Powers

A '"skillful, literate'" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.

With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity - his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor - and elegantly explains his work and its implications.

©2012 David Leavitt (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Coming to age in Mathematics and being gay

If you know anyone into mathematics or computers and is homosexual, you might say your nerdy friend but it goes deeper than just this concept... I highly suggest they learn about Alan Turing and his actual story. I feel if I read this book when I was in high school or early college, I would have learned so much about myself earlier. David Leavitt is an amazing author and Richard Powers narration has just enough flair to keep all the 1s and 0s from putting me asleep.

good book

very educational. Glossed through a lot at end if his life, but his contribution was interesting

terrible book I'd like to return it

Gobaly goop. I couldn't finish it. if you like listening to incomprehensible streams of numbers...

First Audible Book I Returned

Any additional comments?

Professional programmer since 1999 and I had very high hopes for this book. Could not abide the long passages where the narrator was saying, "..zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.." to describe the mathematical logic.