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Turing died on 7 June 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, but the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. [15] . Following a campaign in 2009, British prime minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology for "the appalling way [Turing] was treated".
- Overview
- Early life and career
- The Entscheidungsproblem
- The Church-Turing thesis
- Code breaker
Alan Turing (born June 23, 1912, London, England—died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire) British mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
The son of a civil servant, Turing was educated at a top private school. He entered the University of Cambridge to study mathematics in 1931. After graduating in 1934, he was elected to a fellowship at King’s College (his college since 1931) in recognition of his research in probability theory. In 1936 Turing’s seminal paper “On Computable Numbers,...
What mathematicians called an “effective” method for solving a problem was simply one that could be carried by a human mathematical clerk working by rote. In Turing’s time, those rote-workers were in fact called “computers,” and human computers carried out some aspects of the work later done by electronic computers. The Entscheidungsproblem sought ...
An important step in Turing’s argument about the Entscheidungsproblem was the claim, now called the Church-Turing thesis, that everything humanly computable can also be computed by the universal Turing machine. The claim is important because it marks out the limits of human computation. Church in his work used instead the thesis that all human-computable functions are identical to what he called lambda-definable functions (functions on the positive integers whose values can be calculated by a process of repeated substitution). Turing showed in 1936 that Church’s thesis was equivalent to his own, by proving that every lambda-definable function is computable by the universal Turing machine and vice versa. In a review of Turing’s work, Church acknowledged the superiority of Turing’s formulation of the thesis over his own (which made no reference to computing machinery), saying that the concept of computability by a Turing machine “has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness…evident immediately.”
Britannica Quiz
Having returned from the United States to his fellowship at King’s College in the summer of 1938, Turing went on to join the Government Code and Cypher School, and, at the outbreak of war with Germany in September 1939, he moved to the organization’s wartime headquarters at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. A few weeks previously, the Polish governm...
Apr 2, 2014 · Turing died on June 7, 1954. Following a postmortem exam, it was determined that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. The remains of an apple were found next to the body, though no apple...
Jun 7, 2011 · 23 June 1912. London, England. Died. 7 June 1954. Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. Summary. Alan Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science. View seven larger pictures. Biography. Alan Turing was born at Paddington, London.
Jun 19, 2012 · Alan Turing - the Bletchley Park codebreaker - would have been 100 years old on 23 June had he lived to the present day. To mark the occasion the BBC commissioned a week-long series of articles to ...
Jul 3, 2012 · About a year after his treatment was completed, he killed himself by eating an apple stained with cyanide. The motivations and circumstances of Turing’s death, and whether it was truly a suicide, remain as mysterious as they are tragic. Sculpture of Turing at Bletchley Park, by artist Stephen Kettle.
