Alan Turing
the outcast who gave us the mordern world
All about Alan
Turing was a pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. he is now widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Alan was born in Maida vale, London , while his father, Julius Turing ,was on leave from his position with the Indian civil services, in British India. while he was in the womb, both of his parents decided they wanted a better upbringing so the move to Maida vale where he was born.
Sadly on 8th June 1954, his housekeeper found him dead. He had died the previous day on the 7th. An examination of the body established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered, an half-eaten apple lay beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide. most people believe it was a suicide but one person believed it was a murder!
Dicovery of the egnima and the bombe
he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out. In 1939, Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – where top secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies.
The main focus of Turing’s work at Bletchley was in cracking the ‘Enigma’ code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely. Although Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages and had shared this information with the British, the Germans increased its security and secrecy at the outbreak of war by changing the system every day. doing this had made task of understanding the code even more difficult than it already was.
Turing played a key role in this, inventing – along with fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman – a machine known as the Bombe. This device helped to significantly reduce the work of the code-breakers.