Alan Mathison Turing,
OBE,
FRS (
23 June 1912 –
7 June 1954) was an
English mathematician,
logician, and
cryptographer.Turing is often considered to be the father of modern
computer science. Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the
algorithm and computation with the
Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the
Church–Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine. With the
Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding
artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is
conscious and can
think. He later worked at the
National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1948 he moved to the
University of Manchester to work on the
Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.
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(b. 1912, London, UK, d. 1953, Wilmslow, Cheshire, UK. Ph.D. mathematics, Princeton, 1938). Turing was a major influence on the development of computational theory. The term Turing machine was introduced by Alonzo Church in his 1937 review of Turing’s paper in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Turing proposed the test of thinking in machines that bears his name in a 1950 article in the journal Mind (59, 433-60). See
Turing machine,
Turing test.
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Tadeusz Zawidzki
<
person> Alan M. Turing, 1912-06-22/3? - 1954-06-07. A British mathematician, inventor of the
Turing Machine. Turing also proposed the
Turing test. Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science.
Turing was a student and fellow of
King's College Cambridge and was a graduate student at
Princeton University from 1936 to 1938. While at Princeton Turing published "On Computable Numbers", a paper in which he conceived an
abstract machine, now called a
Turing Machine.
Turing returned to England in 1938 and during World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. He masterminded operations at
Bletchley Park, UK which were highly successful in cracking the Nazis "Enigma" codes during World War II. Some of his early advances in computer design were inspired by the need to perform many repetitive symbolic manipulations quickly. Before the building of the
Colossus computer this work was done by a roomful of women.
In 1945 he joined the
National Physical Laboratory in London and worked on the design and construction of a large computer, named
Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). In 1949 Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at Manchester where the
Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, the worlds largest memory computer, was being built.
He also worked on theories of
artificial intelligence, and on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms.
Turing was gay, and died rather young under mysterious circumstances. He was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952. He died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but it is now thought by some to have been an accident.
There is an excellent biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges, subtitled "The Enigma of Intelligence" and a play based on it called "Breaking the Code". There was also a popular summary of his work in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gdel, Escher, Bach".
http://www.AlanTuring.net/.
(2001-10-09)
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