Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist,
philosopher, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He is known
as one of the most important people in the history of computer science,
often called “the father of modern computers”.
Turing was born in London on the 23rd of June 1912 and grew up in
southern England. He attended King's College, Cambridge, where he
studied mathematics, and later went to Princeton University in the United
States of America, earning his PhD in 1938.
During World War II, Turing worked for the British government at Bletchley
Park, the country's codebreaking center. He was in charge of a group
called "Hut 8," which worked on breaking German naval codes. The
Germans used a machine called the Enigma to send secret messages, and
Turing helped improve a Polish invention called the "Bomba" to break the
Enigma’s code. This work played a key role in helping the Allies win major
battles, such as the Battle of the Atlantic, by giving them access to
German communications.
After the war, Turing continued working on computers. He worked at the
National Physical Laboratory, where he designed one of the first plans for a
modern computer called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). Later, in
1948, he joined the University of Manchester to help develop the
Manchester computers, some of the first real computers. At this time,
Turing also became interested in biology. He wrote a famous paper about
how chemicals in living things can form patterns, a process called
morphogenesis. He even predicted chemical reactions, which were first
observed in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, Turing’s achievements were not really known during his life
because a lot of his work was kept secret due to regulations during the war.
In 1952, Turing was arrested because he was gay, which was illegal in the
UK at the time. He was given the choice between prison or hormone
treatment, and he chose the hormone treatment, (which is often called
chemical castration and can cause anemia, depression, fatigue, heart
disease and others health problems).
Two years later, in 1954, Turing died at the age of 41. An apple with cyanide
was found next to his body which first let the police think it was suicide. However,
some people believe it may have been an accident. In fact, the public have
speculated that Turing's death by cyanide poisoning (inserted in an apple) wasn't
necessarily intentional. He was known to be careless with his experiments, and
accidentally inhaling cyanide or placing an apple in a cyanide puddle wouldn't have been
impossible.
Years after his death, Turing’s treatment provoked indignation. In 2009,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of
the government for the way Turing was treated. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth
II officially pardoned Turing following the release of “the imitation game” (a
movie about his life and more particularly about his work during WW II). In
2017, a law called the "Alan Turing law" was passed, pardoning many men
who had been convicted under old laws that made homosexual acts illegal.
Even though Turing did not receive the recognition he deserved during his
lifetime, today he is celebrated as one of the greatest minds of the 20th
century. There are awards, statues, and memorials in his honor, and his
portrait is on the Bank of England’s £50 note. In 2019, he was voted the
greatest person of the 20th century by the public in a BBC series. His work
continues to influence computer science, mathematics, and biology.
