Alan Turing

Alan Mathius Turing was an English mathematician whose work influenced computer science, logic, and cryptography. He showed an interest in the sciences as early as age six. He showed a determination to excel when at age 14 he had rode his bike 60 miles to get to school. But, Turing's interest lay in the sciences and this was not considered as socially affluent by the educational establishment of England in the 1920s. Still, he showed he could grasp difficult concepts: he read about Einstein's Relativity and solved quite advanced problems before he was 17. (Wikipedia) He received his undergraduate degree in 1934 in mathematics at age 22 from King's College, Cambridge. In 1935, he learned of the so called Entscheidungsproblem, German for the 'decision problem.' Essentially, it is the question of whether there could be a method, an algorithm, by which to show that any given mathematical proposition is provable. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows how Turing approached this problem and his foresight into computing machinery;

The principal difficulty of this question lay in giving an unassailably correct and general definition of what was meant by such expressions as 'definite method' or 'effective procedure.' Turing worked on this alone for a year until April 1936; independence and isolation was to be both his strength, in formulating original ideas, and his weakness, when it came to promoting and implementing them. The word 'mechanical' had often been used of the formalist approach lying behind Hilbert's problem, and Turing seized on the concept of the machine.Turing's solution lay in defining what was soon to be named the Turing machine. With this he defined the concept of 'the mechanical' in terms of simple atomic operations. The Turing machine formalism was modelled on the teleprinter, slightly enlarged in scope to allow a paper tape that could move in both directions and a 'head' that could read, erase and print new symbols, rather than only read and punch permanent holes.

During World War II, Turing worked with the British government as a cryptologist, a code breaker. In 1939 he designed the bombe, a mechanical machine that was used to break the German Enigma coded messages. His work was essential to breaking several related German ciphers and undoubtedly was instrumental to the Allied victory.

In 1945 he worked for 2 years on the Automatic Computing Machine (ACE). In 46 he wrote about a stored-program computer, the first detailed design of such an electronic machine. In 48 he began to speculate on artificial intelligence and proposed what is now known as the Turing Test: communicating with a machine, where such communication by the machine is indistinguishable from human communication.

Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, because of a relationship he had with a person of the same gender. Such relations were illegal in England at the time. Because his work was government secret, he was considered a security risk. He was ordered to undergo chemical treatment for homosexuality. Perhaps this frustration turned out to be overwhelming for Turing. He was found dead after having eaten a cyanide injected apple. The authorities said it was suicide. And, so, on June 7th, 1954, we lost one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived. He was just 41 years old.