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We ask the HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of "gross indecency". In 1952, he was convicted of "gross indecency" with another man and was forced to undergo so-called "organo-therapy"—chemical castration. Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just 41.
- Alan Mathison Turing, 23 June 1912, Maida Vale, London, England
- 7 June 1954 (aged 41), Wilmslow, Cheshire, England
Jun 22, 2012 · Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have committed suicide, as is widely believed. Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland has...
- 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...
Jun 5, 2019 · Two years later, the motive for his apparent suicide, at age 41, remained unclear and left many questions.
Jan 29, 2006 · January 29, 2006. On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night...
Apr 2, 2014 · In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II posthumously granted Turing a rare royal pardon almost 60 years after he committed suicide. Three years later, on October 20, 2016, the British government announced...
Jun 10, 2020 · Turing died in June 1954, aged 41, at his home in Wilmslow, near Manchester, in an apparent suicide. On Christmas Eve in 2013, the Queen signed a posthumous pardon for him.
