1 Book on Alan Turing Every Software Developer Should Read
Understanding Alan Turing and his seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers” as a self-taught software engineer.
I’m a self-taught software developer. What was a childhood hobby turned into my professional career. But, I never went to school for it. My bachelor degree is the incredibly useful (not.) Communications degree. I can communicate all the things!
I avoided math courses as best I could throughout high school and college. Consequently, and despite filling in the gaps with online courses, I’ve always felt inadequate when it comes to mathematics in computer science, and still find reading published papers rather challenging. One academic paper I’ve wanted to understand ever since first coming across an article about Rule 110 and how HTML5 + CSS3 might be Turing-complete, is Alan Turing’s 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to The Entscheidungsproblem”.
Alan Turing was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist whose work influences all our lives. Known for being involved in cracking the German Enigma code in Blechely Park during World War II, he’s also famous for his paper on computability and the introduction of his general-purpose Turing machine which he first…
