Alan Turing was born in London in 1912. His 1936 paper 'On Computable Numbers' introduced the abstract machine that now bears his name and defined what computation is. During the Second World War he led the team at Bletchley Park that broke the German Enigma cipher; estimates suggest his work shortened the war by two years and saved perhaps fourteen million lives. After the war he designed the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory, worked on early Manchester computers, and proposed the imitation game (the 'Turing test') as a criterion for machine intelligence. In 1952 he was prosecuted for homosexuality and accepted chemical castration in lieu of prison; on June 7, 1954 he was found dead in his bed beside a half-eaten apple laced with cyanide. He was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, and his face appears on the British £50 note.
All Figures
Mathematician · Codebreaker · Father of Computer Science
Alan Turing
1,912 CE – 1,954 CE
The British mathematician who imagined the modern computer in a 1936 paper, broke the German Enigma cipher during the war — and was driven to suicide by the country he had saved.
Lifetime
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