Charles Petzold

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.