Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a British mathematician, logician, computer scientist, and cryptographer. He is widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern computing and is best known for his work during World War II on breaking German codes, including the Enigma machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their communications.

In 1936, Turing published a paper titled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Decision problem), in which he proposed the concept of a universal machine, now known as a Turing machine, which is considered a theoretical model of a general-purpose computer.

Turing also proposed an experiment, known as the Turing test, which is a measure of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from that of a human.

In 1952, Turing was convicted of homosexuality, which was then a crime in the UK. He was forced to undergo chemical castration as a punishment. He committed suicide in 1954. His persecution was regarded as a tragedy and an injustice, and in 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology on behalf of the British government.

Turing’s work laid the foundation for theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, and his contributions to the fields of mathematics, logic, and code-breaking during WWII are considered to have been of great importance to the Allied victory.