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Martin Davis Reviews “The Annotated Turing” for “American Scientist”

October 11, 2008
New York, N.Y.

I'm pleased and honored to discover that esteemed mathematician Martin Davis has reviewed my recent book The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine (Wiley, 2008) for the November-December 2008 issue of American Scientist magazine:

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/touring-turing

Professor Davis writes (in part):

Petzold will be a stalwart companion to any reader who undertakes to read Turing's classic with his aid. The Annotated Turing will also be quite enjoyable to a more casual reader who chooses to dip into various parts of the text.

Martin Davis wrote the first textbook on computability theory, Computability and Unsolvability (McGraw-Hill, 1958), which adapted the Turing Machine as a tool for understanding the abilities and limitations of computers. In 1954 he wrote the first computer program to perform a mathematical proof, and along with Julia Robinson and Hilary Putnam, established the foundations for Yuri Matiyasevich's 1970 negative proof of Hilbert's Tenth Problem. More recently, Professor Davis wrote a very entertaining and enlightening book on the history of computing, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (W. W. Norton, 2000), published in paperback under the title Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer.