My publications on
Alan Turing

by Andrew Hodges

For a guide to this website go to the Alan Turing Home Page




Publication list

This page gives a listing, in chronological order, of most of my publications concerned with the life and work of Alan Turing. I haven't included all the short newspaper and magazine articles or reference book entries.

My book Alan Turing: the Enigma  first appeared in 1983 and has remained in print ever since, with a new British edition in 1992, a new American edition in 2000, and several translations. New Centenary editions appeared in 2012.

The dramatist Hugh Whitemore used it as the basis for a stage-play (and later TV film) Breaking the Code.  The Pet Shop Boys used excerpts in a concert work first performed on 23 July 2014.

More details on the Book area of this website.

I contributed to a BBC Radio series on scientists, and wrote a chapter for a related book. This had the antediluvian title of Man Masters Nature (BBC Books, 1987).

Rolf Herken, who oversaw the translation of my book into German, invited me to contribute an introductory essay Alan Turing and the Turing Machine  for the volume he conceived and edited: The Universal Turing Machine, a Half-Century Survey,  ed. R. Herken, Kammerer & Unversagt, Hamburg, and Oxford University Press (1988).

The London Sunday Times  of 7 May 1995 carried an article by me on Alan Turing at VE Day, as part of its feature on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the European war.

In 1995 I contributed an entry on Alan Turing for the (British) Dictionary of National Biography, which eventually appeared in 2004. I have used an expanded version of it as the Short Biography on this website, which was also started off in 1995.

In 1996 Ray Monk invited me to write the short text which appeared in 1997 as Turing: a natural philosopher  in the Great Philosophers  series which he edited. It has also become a chapter in an omnibus book edition of The Great Philosophers.

In 1999 Professor Ed Zalta, the editor of the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, invited me to submit an entry on Turing's life and thought. This article, first published in 2002 and updated in 2013, is still available in the SEP.

In the late 1990s Mike Yates, in editing the last volume of the Turing Collected Works  (see the main bibliography for a description) asked me to contribute two short prefaces on Turing's Treatise on the Enigma and The Nature of Turing and the Physical World.

On 23 June 1998 I gave an oration at Alan Turing's birthplace in London, on the occasion of the unveiling of an English Heritage blue plaque. Text and picture here.

In 1999 I was asked by Cambridge University Press to contribute a chapter on Turing for Cambridge Scientific Minds,  which appeared in 2002. The text is available here as

In 2000 I contributed an entry for the Blackwell Companion to Philosophical Logic  (ed. Dale Jacquette, 2003)

In October 2000 I spoke in Hamburg to a forum on the subject: Jenseits der Turing-Maschine [Beyond the Turing machine]. This formed part of an extended series on computer-related topics organised by Interface 5, published as Die Politik der Maschine (Verlag Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg 2002).

In 2001 I was asked to write an entry on Turing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of The Philosophy of Science,  eds. S. Sarkar and J. Pfeifer, which eventually appeared in 2005.

In 2001 I was also asked to write a contribution for a sourcebook on the Turing Test. The volume eventually appeared as Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer, eds. Robert Epstein, Gary Roberts, Grace Beber (Springer, 2008.). See my text:

In June 2002 I gave an invited talk for the Turing Day at Lausanne, Switzerland. For the conference volume, a 90th birthday Festschrift entitled Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, (ed. Christof Teuscher) I contributed a chapter on What would Alan Turing have done after 1954? and a short

I was also invited to speak at a conference on Mathematics and War held at Karlskrona, Sweden, in August 2002. My talk appeared as an article in the conference volume Mathematics and War  (eds. B. Booss-Bavnbek and J. Høyrup, Birkhäuser, 2003):

In 2003 the British computer magazine PC Pro commissioned a feature article on Turing's computer design and the Japan Times also commissioned an article, which I wrote as a review of a print by the artist Jin Wicked.

In August 2003 I gave a talk on Alan Turing at Imperial War Museum North. This also formed part of the programme of the lesbian and gay Europride. An article based on my talk, which was designed to link themes of war, sexuality, and science, appears here:

In June 2004, for the fifieth anniversary of Turing's death, I spoke at a joint meeting of the British Logic Colloquium and the British Society for the History of Mathematics. The papers for this meeting are introduced and published on this page of the British Computer Society site. They include my article on Alan Turing: the logical and physical basis of computing.

In 2005, I contributed short entries to the Princeton Companion to Mathematics and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I was invited to speak at the opening of the Computability in Europe conference in Amsterdam, June 2005. A text based on this talk appeared as the opening paper of New Computational Paradigms, eds. Barry Cooper, Benedikt Löwe, Andrea Sorbi (Springer, 2008).

I was invited to speak on the topic Can quantum computing solve classically unsolvable problems? at the meeting of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy at Lisbon in August 2005.
The text is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0512248

I was also invited by the editor, Prof. Adam Olszewski, to contribute to a volume on Church's Thesis after 70 years. This was published in June 2006. My article Did Church and Turing have a thesis about machines? is available on this site.

In November 2006, a special issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society carried a long review by me of Copeland's Essential Turing edition. This is available on-line directly in .pdf form. The review has appeared in Chinese translation in the journal Mathematical Advance in Translation (Beijing, 2008).

A further article by me has appeared in The Mechanical Mind in History, eds. P. Husbands and O. Holland, M. Wheeler, MIT Press (2008).

A review 'in retrospect' of Gödel's Proof appeared in Nature, vol. 454, page 829 (14 August 2008). Available online here.

My participation in the 2008 Loebner Contest at Reading University was reflected in an article Fair play for machines, Kybernetes 39, 441 (2010).

I was invited by several journals to write for the Turing 2012 centenary, and one topical comment appeared in Nature 482, page 441 (23 February 2012). Further articles appeared in Science 336, 136 and IEEE Spectrum, June 2012.


I have other publications in my main research area, which is in theoretical physics. These can be found on another site.

See also my University of Oxford page.




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