Alan Turing (1912-1954)

In a paper on mathematical logic in 1936, Alan Turing, an English mathematician, proposed the construct of a very simple machine whose programs did not distinguish between data and instructions. Almost ten years before the universal computer was invented, Turing had found an abstract mathematical model for just such a machine - the Turing machine.

 

Alan Turing was born in London in 1912, and grew up with his older brother in foster families in England. His parents lived in India, where his father was employed in the Indian Civil Service. Turing studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, from 1931 to 1934, and was appointed Fellow there in 1935. During World War II, he worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where he played a significant role in breaking the German codes that had been generated with the Enigma cypher machine.

 

At the end of the war, Turing turned his attention to computer development, but neither his activity at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (1945-47), where he designed the concept for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), nor his position as Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester (from 1948) gave him any major impact on the development of computers in Great Britain.

In 1952, Alan Turing was sentenced to a year's treatment with oestrogen hormones to "cure" him of his homosexuality. One year after the end of treatment, on 7th June 1954, he committed suicide. Alan Turing hardly had any influence on the invention of computers in the 1940s and 1950s, but his theories gave him a place in the history of computers. The Turing Machine is still an important basis for research in computer science, and the Turing Test that he proposed in 1950 to answer the question "Can machines think?" stimulated the development of artificial intelligence.

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