Alan turing
By Keagan Campbell
year born / died
He died on June 7 1954
3 interesting facts
why they are famous
The Biography
At a young age he displayed signs of high, some of his teachers recognized but didn’t necessarily respect it. 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 you guessed it, 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 “Entscheidungs problem”, in which he presented the notion of a universal machine (later called the universal turing machine, and then the “turing machine”) capable of simulating any computer algorithm, the central concept of the modern computer was based on Turing paper,
The next two years of his life were spent studying mathematics and cryptology at the institute for advanced study in Princeton, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. from the Princeton university in 1938 he returned to Cambridge, then he took a part-time position with the government code and cypher school.
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 crypt-analysis 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, that's right I said 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.
During the early 1950s homosexuality was illegal, so when he called the police after what I call the worst breakup ever (he was robbed by his ex), he got put in jail of “gross indecency”. Following his arrest Turing was forced to choose between temporary probation and a libido reduction, or imprisonment. He chose the libido reduction, soon he went under chemical castration through injections of a synthetic estrogen hormone for a year which eventually rendered him impotent.
Turing died on June 7, 1954. Following a postmortem exam, it was determined that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. The remains of an apple were found next to the body, though no apple parts were found in his stomach. The autopsy reported that "four ounces of fluid which smelled strongly of bitter almonds, as does a solution of cyanide" was found in the stomach. Trace smell of bitter almonds was also reported in vital organs. The autopsy concluded that the cause of death was asphyxia due to cyanide poisoning and ruled a suicide.
In a June 2012 BBC article, philosophy professor and Turing expert Jack Copeland argued that Turing's death may have been an accident. The apple was never tested for cyanide, nothing in the accounts of Turing's last days suggested he was suicidal and Turing had cyanide in his house for chemical experiments he conducted in his spare room.
Shortly after World War II, Alan Turing was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his work. For what would have been his 86th birthday, Turing biographer Andrew Hodges unveiled an official English Heritage blue plaque at his childhood home. In June 2007, a life-size statue of Turing was unveiled at Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire, England. A bronze statue of Turing was unveiled at the University of Surrey on October 28, 2004, to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Additionally, the Princeton University Alumni Weekly named Turing the second most significant alumnus in the history of the school.