Alan Turing's reading list (with readable links) (original) (raw)

Alex Bellos published a list of books that Alan Turing took out from the school library as a child. I've tracked down as many as possible should you wish to follow his reading.

1. Isotopes by Frederick William Aston (1922 edition).

2. Mathematical Recreations and Essays by W. W. Rouse Ball

3. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Game of Logic and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

4. The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences by William Kingdon Clifford.

5. Space, Time and Gravitation and The Nature of the Physical World by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.

6. Sidelights on Einstein by Albert Einstein.

7. The Escaping Club by A. J. Evans.

8. The New Physics by Arthur Haas.

9. Supply and Demand by Hubert D. Henderson.

10. Atoms and Rays and Phases of Modern Science by Sir Oliver Lodge.

11. Matter and Motion by James Clerk Maxwell.

12. The Theory of Heat by Thomas Preston.

13. Modern Chromatics, with applications to art and industry by Ogden Nicholas Rood.

14. Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes by Thomas William Webb.

15. The Recent Development of Physical Science by William Cecil Dampier Whetham.

16. Science and The Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead.

One book stands out as totally different from all the others: The Escaping Club by A. J. Evans. I'm putting that on my Kindle.