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The NameDr. Alan Mathison Turing is the father of modern computing. He entered Cambridge in 1931 to study mathematics. By 1935 (at age 23), he was a fellow. In 1937, he published a paper which described the greatest product of his mind: "On Computable Numbers." In that paper, he put forth a model for a general "re-programmable" computing machine that could be used to solve any problem of logic. The paper received very little attention. In 1938, Turing was approached by British military intelligence. They asked that he join an elite team of mathematicians attempting to break the Nazi 'Enigma' cipher, which was used for all naval communications traffic by Hitler's regime. In 1939, he began work at Bletchley Park, a secret communications research installation some 70 miles north of London. There he worked with W. G. Welchman to construct "The Bombe" a device capable of decrypting messages enciphered with Enigma machines. These encrypted messages carried attack instructions and coordinates to U-Boats, which wreaked havoc on American merchant marine shipments, the only lifeline of supply to Britain. Turing's work at Bletchley Park allowed allied forces to stem the tide of U-Boat attacks and conduct communications surveillance on thousands of Nazi transmission sites. If Turing and the other mathematicians had failed, Britain would have been cut off from American assistance and would quickly have fallen to Hitler. Short of Churchill, Alan Turing is probably responsible for saving the most lives of any single member of the allied forces. His work provided Churchill and Roosevelt with the information necessary to cripple and later destroy the Nazi military machine. After the war, Turing assisted in the construction of a machine called the Mark I. It was one of the first general purpose mechanical computers used for tangible research. During this period, Turing developed sophisticated theories about the structure of living organisms and began to consider complex biological systems simply as Turing machines. His mind had immediately leapt past the mechanical limitations of the time. In 1950, he published a paper called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which is the first publication on Artificial Intelligence. In 1951, he was elected as a member of the Royal Society for his work with The Turing Machine. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted of homosexuality. At that time, he was stripped of all security clearances. Persecuted by the society he had helped to save from destruction, he committed suicide in 1954. While terrible, his end somehow fits his life -- he was different in nearly every way an individual can be different. His mind, his beliefs, and his sexual preferences were all so outside the norm of the time that he could not help but live a life riddled with tragedy. Links: |
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