Alan Turing

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 "Godel, Escher,

Bach".

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(2001-10-09)