Author: Andrew Hodges

Alan Turing: The Enigma, published in 1983, is still the standard life of the mathematician who set out the theory behind modern computing and led the wartime attack on the German naval cipher. Its author, Andrew Hodges, is a Londoner, born in 1949, who took his doctorate at Birkbeck in 1975 under Roger Penrose, whose twistor theory he has worked on ever since; he has been attached to Wadham College, Oxford since 1986, latterly as emeritus senior research fellow in mathematics. His part in 1970s gay liberation, and With Downcast Gays, the 1974 pamphlet he wrote with David Hutter, shaped the biography's refusal to treat Turing's homosexuality and the prosecution that followed it as a footnote. Hugh Whitemore's play Breaking the Code (1986) and the 2014 film The Imitation Game both draw on it.