To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.
With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity-his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor-and elegantly explains his work and its implications.

David Leavitt is the author of novels including The Body of Jonah Boyd and The Two Hotel Francforts, as well as story collections. The New York Public Library honored him as a Literary Lion. He teaches creative writing at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he lives.