Computer Science News
Alan Turing book wins prestigious prize
Alan Turing book takes top prize at PROSE Awards with RR Hawkins Award. The book won top prize in each of the two categories in which it was entered and it won the overall prize across all 40 of the categories. The book, which includes a contribution from Warwick's own Meurig Beynon, was edited by Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen. With seventy distinguished contributors together with a generous selection of Turing’s own texts the volume offers a wonderful panorama of the range and the depth of Turing’s thought and activity.
In the words of Myer Kutz, President of Myer Kutz Associates and a Mathematics Judge for PROSE:
This remarkable volume contains not only a selection of more than two dozen of Turing's most important writings, lectures and broadcasts, from 1936 to 1954, but also extensive commentaries from researchers and practitioners, whose intellectual and personal lives Turing's persona and work have influenced profoundly. The breadth of Turing's interests is astonishing. The products of this unique mind are made accessible to both specialists and general readers by this touching and learned book – a fitting recipient of 2013 RR Hawkins Award.
Alan Turing was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.