Alan Turing Biography
Mathematician, Educator (1912–1954)
UPDATED:
JUL 16, 2019
ORIGINAL:
OCT 30, 2014
The famed code-breaking war hero, now considered the father of computer science and
artificial intelligence, was criminally convicted and harshly treated under the U.K.'s
homophobic laws.
Who Was Alan Turing?
Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician who took a leading role in breaking Nazi
ciphers during WWII. In his seminal 1936 paper, he proved that there cannot exist any universal
algorithmic method of determining truth in mathematics, and that mathematics will always
contain undecidable propositions. His work is widely acknowledged as foundational research of
computer science and artificial intelligence.
Early Life
English scientist Alan Turing was born Alan Mathison Turing on June 23, 1912, in Maida Vale,
London, England. At a young age, he displayed signs of high intelligence, which some of his
teachers recognized, but did not necessarily respect. When Turing attended the well-known
independent Sherborne School at the age of 13, he became particularly interested in math and
science.
After Sherborne, Turing enrolled at King's College (University of Cambridge) in Cambridge,
England, studying there from 1931 to 1934. As a result of his dissertation, in which he proved
the central limit theorem, Turing was elected a fellow at the school upon his graduation.
In 1936, Turing delivered a paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem," in which he presented the notion of a universal machine (later called the
“Universal Turing Machine," and then the "Turing machine") capable of computing anything
that is computable: It is considered the precursor to the modern computer.
Over the next two years, Turing studied mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University
in 1938, he returned to Cambridge, and then took a part-time position with the Government Code
and Cypher School, a British code-breaking organization.
Cryptanalysis and Early Computers
During World War II, Turing was a leading participant in wartime code-breaking, particularly
that of German ciphers. He worked at Bletchley Park, the GCCS wartime station, where he made
five major advances in the field of cryptanalysis, including specifying the bombe, an
electromechanical device used to help decipher German Enigma encrypted signals.
Turing’s contributions to the code-breaking process didn’t stop there: He also wrote two papers
about mathematical approaches to code-breaking, which became such important assets to the
Code and Cypher School (later known as the Government Communications Headquarters) that
the GCHQ waited until April 2012 to release them to the National Archives of the United
Kingdom.
Turing moved to London in the mid-1940s, and began working for the National Physical
Laboratory. Among his most notable contributions while working at the facility, Turing led the
design work for the Automatic Computing Engine and ultimately created a groundbreaking
blueprint for store-program computers. Though a complete version of the ACE was never built,
its concept has been used as a model by tech corporations worldwide for several years,
influencing the design of the English Electric DEUCE and the American Bendix G-15—credited
by many in the tech industry as the world’s first personal computer—among other computer
models.
Turing went on to hold high-ranking positions in the mathematics department and later the
computing laboratory at the University of Manchester in the late 1940s. He first addressed the
issue of artificial intelligence in his 1950 paper, "Computing machinery and intelligence," and
proposed an experiment known as the “Turing Test”—an effort to create an intelligence design
standard for the tech industry. Over the past several decades, the test has significantly influenced
debates over artificial intelligence.
