Turing

Alan Mathison Turing

Born: 23 June 1912 in London, England
Died: 7 June 1954 in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England

Alan Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science.

Turing studied at King's College, Cambridge. In 1936 he published published On Computable Numbers , a paper in which he conceived an abstract machine, now called a Turing machine, which moved from one state to another using a precise set of rules.

He was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938 and returned to England in 1938. During World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. Here he played a leading role in efforts to break enemy codes.

In 1945 he joined the National Physical Laboratory in London and worked on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). Turing's design was at that point an original detailed design and prospectus for a computer in the modern sense, and in the 1945-8 period, led the world. (The size he planned, regarded then as hopelessly over-ambitious, was for 4K bytes of storage)

In 1948 Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at Manchester, where the Manchester University Computer, the first actually running example of an electronic stored program 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 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.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. A Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983).
  4. S Turing, Alan M Turing (Cambridge, 1959).
  5. M H A Newman, Alan Mathison Turing, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 1 (1955), 253-263.
  6. H Whitemore, Writing about Alan Turing, Mathematical Intelligencer 13 (5), 26-30.
  7. P Hilton, Working with Alan Turing, Mathematical Intelligencer 13 (5), 22-25.
  8. W A Atherton, Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954): the solitary genius who wanted to build a brain, Electronics and wireless world 96 (1989), 582-583.
  9. S L Zabell, Alan Turing and the Central Limit Theorem, Amer. Math. Monthly 102 (1995), 483-494.