Name: The Annotated Turing
ISBN: 9780470229057

The Annotated Turing

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. Turing. Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming.

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schmuddeSep 2026

"The Annotated Turing" - I didn't know you could meaningfully intertwine biography and technical analysis like that.

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rramadassAug 2026

My point is that each of the material above (and i forgot to add the original Quantum Mechanics papers) were major watershed moments in science/mathematics and hence are not easy to read/understand. You need a good background in the subject matter(and mathematics) and/or somebody guiding you through them.

So what i do is try and find books which are written for the "educated common reader" by an expert who guides you through the original paper/book. It is still difficult to understand if you do not have the necessary background but at least you have a good starting point.

Some books in my collection;

1) Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S.Chandrasekhar

2) Maxwell on the Electromagnetic Field: A Guided Study (Masterworks of Discovery) by Thomas Simpson

3) Einstein's Miraculous Year by John Stachel.

4) The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold.

What we need is for a group of professors to get together and start writing a series on explaining the original papers to the "educated common reader" i.e. not too trivial nor too overwhelming. I think there is a huge market for this since it humanizes how science is done in real life which is fundamental for motivation.

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incorporealAug 2026

The Annotated Turing is great. Thanks for mentioning the others, I'll check them out. I've read a little of Einstein's original work (in longish excerpts) and it was a nice enough read I'd welcome more of it, especially with expert guidance.

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cs702Jan 2025

Great list of papers.

I've read five of of the seven papers on the list. The two I haven't read are Cerf and Kahn's, and Berner-Lee's.

Turing's paper on computability was particularly hard to follow, for me, because he used these gothic-font upper-chase characters to name all sorts of objects, and all those characters looked kinda the same to me! I had to use auxiliary materials to be able to make my way through the paper. Today, I would recommend reading it with Charles Petzold's easy-to-follow book on the paper: https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...

Cook's paper on NP-completeness was also hard to follow (again, for me). As with Turing's paper, I had to use auxiliary materials to make my way. Today, I would recommend reading instead an introductory book on computational complexity that works through Cook's proof.

Shannon's paper is a work of art, clearly articulated and beautifully written. It's just not casual reading, to put it mildly.

Brin and Page's paper, and Codd's paper, are not hard to follow, at least as I remember them, but understanding Brin and Page's work requires some knowledge of Linear Algebra.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

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rramadassAug 2024

The actual quote is;

It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics one should study the masters and not the pupils.

— N.H. Abel (1802–1829), quoted from an unpublished source by O. Ore in Niels Henrik Abel, Mathematician Extraordinary, p. 138.

This is my absolute favourite quote too and i always keep this in mind. I think this is very relevant today since it seems every "Tom, Dick and Harry" wants to write a book most of which is mere parroting from other sources with no insight/simplification/intuition whatsoever. It is only the "Masters" who have a way of directly getting to the heart of the matter in the simplest manner possible. To this end i try and collect some of the original texts with detailed explanations so that i can learn from them. Some interesting ones are;

1) A Source Book in Mathematics by David Eugene Smith (Dover Publications) - https://archive.org/details/sourcebookinmath00smit

2) Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by Nobel-prize winning Physicist S.Chandrasekhar - https://archive.org/details/newtonsprincipia0000chan

3) Maxwell on the Electromagnetic Field: A Guided Study (Masterworks of Discovery series) by Thomas Simpson - https://archive.org/details/maxwellonelectro0000simp

4) The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold - http://theannotatedturing.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annotated_Turing

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criddellOct 2023

For very foundational stuff, Charles Petzold has put out some great books.

His book Code is fantastic. He starts at simple battery and lightbulb circuits and builds and builds towards a simple CPU.

He also wrote The Annotated Turing which is a breakdown of Alan Turing seminal paper and you only need high school math to get through it.

When I was in school my favorite course was compiler design and we used Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (aka the dragon book). It’s one of the best textbooks I’ve used but that was 30 years ago. There might be something better now. Understanding parsers and lexers and (especially) state machines is something that will serve you well.

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