Alan Turing (1912-1954: England)
While Alan Turing could hardly today be called a “household name,” his work in mathematics led him to develop the founding principle of computer science and create a prototype computer, thus affecting the lives of most citizens of the 21st century.
Americans should also be appreciative of his intelligence work in World War II, for he is credited with leading the team that developed in 1940 a radically different machine (the “Bombe”) that broke the German secret code, enabling cryptanalysts to understand up to 84,000 German messages a month, thus helping to ensure an Allied victory. Turing received the Order of the British Empire for his code-breaking work during the war.
At King’s College, Cambridge University, the student Turing studied mathematics and probability theory. He earned a graduate fellowship at King’s and later completed a doctorate in mathematical logic at Princeton in the United States (1938). In 1936, Turing published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (Decision Problem)” that sought an effective method for deciding which mathematical statements are provable and which are not. He also argued that any effectively calculable function could be computed by what was called a universal “Turing machine,” the theoretical idea of a computer.
After the war, Turing designed the Automatic Computing Engine for the National Physical Laboratory in London, specifying the first electronic stored-program general-purpose digital computer. Turing is also regarded as a pioneer of artificial intelligence, because he hypothesized that the human brain is similar to a digital computing machine; he also developed the Turing test for whether a machine thinks.
In 1952, after being prosecuted for the “crime” of homosexuality, Turing lost his security clearance and could no longer do government work with codes and computers; he became a reader in the theory of computing at the University of Manchester. He died from cyanide poisoning. The official verdict for his death was suicide.
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing
Mind, A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, October 1950.
Used by permission of Oxford University Press.
“Code Breaker, The life and death of Alan Turing,” Jim Holt
The New Yorker, February 6, 2006
© 2006 The New Yorker
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, Chapter One, David Leavitt
By permission of the author
Alan Turing
Portrait photo: National Portrait Gallery, London
Alan Turing: World Class Distance Runner
Photos: The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook
Website maintained by Andrew Hodges
Used with permission.
Photograph 1: Alan Turing (on the bus steps) with other members of the Walton Athletic Club, an amateur club based in Walton, Surrey, an outer suburb of south-west London. Walton was not far from the National Physical Laboratory where Turing was working from 1945 to 1947.The club members were probably on their way to a race meeting on a Saturday in 1946.
Photograph 2: Turing achieved world-class Marathon standards. His best time of 2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds, was only 11 minutes slower than the winner in the 1948 Olympic Games. In a 1948 cross-country race he finished ahead of Tom Richards, who was to win the silver medal in the Olympics.
