Alan Turing
By Renzo Binas
Who Is Alan Turing?
Alan Turing was born on 23 June, 1912, in London. His father was in the Indian Civil Service and Turing's parents lived in India until his father's retirement in 1926.
Alan Turing was a man before his time. This brilliant English code-breaker helped turn the tide of World War II, and was arguably one of the fathers of the entire field of computer
He was a brilliant mathematician and logician. He developed the idea of the modern computer and artificial intelligence.
v During the late 1940s he worked in the University of Manchester in mathematics and computing. His experiment, the Turing test tried to devise an intelligence standard for technology.
However, a bio of Alan Turing is not complete without addressing the facts of his personal life. According to 1952 legal charges, he became involved with what was termed ‘a bit of rough trade’. In other words, he had a short term sexual liaison with a laborer who was down on his luck financially. The scandal of this British national intellectual treasure, a Fellow of the Royal Society, innovator in a whole new discipline of study, and the savior of the navy, being revealed as a homosexual, was immense. The humiliating trial ruined his career and his life
The Enigma
The Code Breaker
The Bombe was an electromechanical device used by British cytologists to help decipher German Enigma-Machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, but engineered differently from each other and from the British Bombe. Alan Turing was the first person to make the computer and he used to crack the German Enigma Code.