As Alan Turing’s centenary year opens, Nature hails him as one of the top scientific minds of all time in a special issue that sweeps through Turing’s innumerable achievements — wartime code-breaker and founder of computer science — to his lesser known interests of botany, neural nets, unorganized machines, quantum physics and, well, ghosts.

Beneath it all, Turing was driven by the dream of reviving — possibly in the form of a computer program — the soul of Christopher Morcom, perhaps his only true friend, who died abruptly when they were both teenagers. I want to “build a brain,” he said.

[ Nature News ]