Alan Turing: The Enigma

You'll be hearing a lot about Alan Turing this fall, with The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, telling the story of this math genius who played a crucial code-breaking role in World War II and then was hounded to suicide for being gay. The movie is based, to the extent these things are, on Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography, a book I've had unread on my shelf for a couple of decades now, which doesn't stop me from imagining I still might read it some day. It's talked about as one of the great scientific biographies—Hodges is himself a math professor—and unlike most movie-tie-in editions, the new reissue from Princeton is a more handsome volume than any previous one. Maybe if I replace the ugly 1992 paperback on my shelf with this one I'll finally read it.