Born: June 23, 1912
Died: June 7, 1954
Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London,
England, the son of Julius Mathison Turing, a civil servant, and Ethel Sara
Stoney; his mother would rejoin her husband in India when Alan was a year old,
leaving him under the care of family friends.
During his time at Hurst Preporatory School, Alan had been described as an "average
to good" student in his studies, but struggled in English and was often preoccupied
with his own solutions instead of using the methods his math class taught him.
Despite this, he would eventually go on to study mathematics at King's College, Cambridge.
There, while working on the Entscheidungsproblem, which asked if there is an algorithm
that can accurately determine if a statement is true or false, Turing created the
Turing machine, a theoretical computing device that would serve as a
blueprint that modern digital computers would follow. He would later go on to complete his
PhD in 1937.
In the summer of 1938, Turing would join the Government Code and Cypher School. War was on the horizon,
and in September 1939, the breakout of World War I, he would be moved to the school's military headquarters. During the war, Nazi Germany
made extensive use of the Enigma machine to conceal their radio communications within a cipher. Turing, along
with other colleagues, created a machine designed to counter the cipher, the Bombe,
during autumn 1939 and spring 1940. The Bombe proved to be very valuable during the war, intercepting and decoding about 39,000 messages a month by 1942, which would
later increase to 84,000 a month. For his efforts, Turing would become an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of
the British Empire (OBE). After the war ended in 1945, Alan would be recruited to the National Physical Laboratory; there,
he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, the world's first complete-design general-purpose digital computer.
While these are indeed impressive achievements, these would only be secondary to Turing's most important contribution: the concept
of artificial intelligence. He hypothesized that the human brain worked much like a digital computer; it starts as an "unorganized machine"
at birth that organizes itself through "training" into "a universal machine or something like it." These observations
would eventually lead him to develop the Turing test in 1950, a set of criteria that could be used to determine if a computer
was actually capable of thought. He would later become a fellow of the Royal Society of London in March 1951.
Unfortunately for Turing, however, his success wouldn't last forever. In March 1952, Alan Turing was convicted of "gross indecency" -
homosexuality, a criminal offense in Britain at the time - and sentenced to a year of hormone "therapy"; his newfound criminal record
would bar him from working for Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, a code-breaking center the government established
postwar. Undeterred, Turing would move to Manchester, where he would spend his career studying artificial life. Tragically, however, he
wouldn't be able to finish his unprecedented research, as he was found dead in his bed on June 7, 1954 from cyanide poisoning. Turing's conviction
for homosexuality would receive attention during the early 21st century, with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologizing for Turing's
treatment in 2009; he would receive a posthumous pardon by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013.
In spite of his tragically short life, Turing took remarkable steps to push the field of computer science into the modern day. It's no wonder, then, why
he's called "The Father of Computer Science".
GMU CS Department home page: cs.gmu.edu