Quotes from Andrew Hodges

Hilbert, who was always down-to-earth, liked to say: 'One must always be able to say "tables, chairs, beer-mugs", instead of "points, lines, planes".

The line between 'mathematicians' and 'engineers' was demarcated very clearly, and if not quite an Iron Curtain, it was a barrier as awkward as the MacMahon Act.

The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to us, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves.

The separation between any two events in the history of a particle shall be a maximum or minimum when measured along its world line.

God, having created his Universe, has now screwed the cap on His pen, put His feet on the mantelpiece and left the work to get on with itself.

Riemann Hypothesis

The opening of a public debate about male homosexuality in Britain in 1952 was the conflict of the small back room, in another sphere.

One is perhaps too inclined to think only of him alive at some future time when we shall meet him again; but it is really so much more helpful to think of him as just separated from us for the present.

On 25 May 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, speaking to the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as British contributors to science. Celebrity is an imperfect measure of significance, and politicians do not confer scientific status, but Obama's choice signalled that public recognition of Alan Turing had attained a level very much higher than in 1983, when this book first appeared.

It was difficult enough being a mathematician, this being the frightening subject of which even educated people knew nothing, not even what it was, and of which they might proudly boast ignorance. His

the global impact of pure science rises above all national boundaries, and the sheer timelessness of pure mathematics transcends the limitations of his twentieth-century span. When Turing returned to the prime numbers in 1950 they were unchanged from when he left them in 1939, wars

All that I can claim is that my deliberate policy of leaving him largely to his own devices and standing by to assist when necessary, allowed his natural mathematical genius to progress uninhibited …

had the effect of increasing state dependence upon machinery not only beyond the control, but even completely outside the knowledge, of those who paid for it.

The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.

corpus as with mens, and found the same difficulties with both: a lack

Yet the system prevailed, in all but details. One could conform, rebel, or withdraw – and Alan withdrew.

Turing machine.

uncomputable numbers

He also liked to root around in sales and street markets, and picked up a violin in London, on Farringdon Road, for which he took some lessons.

he talked excitedly of the future of automatic computers, and reassured them that mathematicians would not be put out of work. In

Although that interest is partly gone, I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do. I

had explicitly been concerned to treat mathematics as if it were a chess game, without asking for a connection with the world. That question was, as it were, always left for someone else to tackle.

To those who perceived marriage and child-raising as duties rather than as choices

As regards the question of why we have bodies at all, why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.