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Jun 21, 2012 · Saturday 23 June 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing - mathematical genius, hero of the WWII code breakers of Bletchley Park, and father of modern computing.
- 8 min
- 787.6K
- Cambridge University
Apr 15, 2024 · Dive into the remarkable life of Alan Turing, often regarded as the father of artificial intelligence. From his early years and education to his pivotal role in World War II code-breaking with...
- 9 min
- 671
- ScienceWeek
Mar 22, 2022 · Alan Turing: The Scientist Who Saved The Allies | Man Who Cracked The Nazi Code | Timeline. During the Second World War, the allies' key objective was to crack the German army's encrypted ...
- 52 min
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- Timeline - World History Documentaries
Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ ˈ tj ʊər ɪ ŋ /; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. [5]
- 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...
Jul 15, 2014 · Alan Turing : the enigma. A gripping story of mathematics, science, computing, war history, cryptography, and homosexual persecution and liberation. Hodges tells how Turing's revolutionary idea of 1936-- the concept of a universal machine-- laid the foundation for the modern computer.
This digital archive contains many of Turing's letters, transcriptions of talks, photographs and unpublished papers, as well as memoirs and obituaries written about him. It contains images of the original documents that are held in the Turing collection at King's College, Cambridge.
