Alan Turing: A Historical Worthies Of Post-War Britain

Turing became alarmed about the war with Germany in the fall of 1937. At the time, Turing spent his time studying and working on a thesis based on the theory of computation and on the hypothetical devices later known as Turing machines. A Turing machine in today’s sense would be a model for a modern computer. Besides the important work with his research, he found time to enjoyably take up the subject of cryptanalysis assuming words would be replaced by numbers eventually to be transmitted on a binary scale: in zeros and ones, on and off, true and false. Turing himself even spent the time building hardware to produce ciphering machines as a hobby while at Princeton. These precursors were a perfect setup for the work he would pursue with the GC&CS and Turing a natural recruit.

Alan Mathison Turing was born in Paddington, London on June 23, 1912. At a young age he displayed many signs of high intelligence. When his parents and teachers saw this, they sent him to the very prestigious Sherborne School at only thirteen years old. There, he studied math and science which sparked his interest for computers and coding. After finishing his studies at Sherborne, he enrolled at King’s College, or what is now known as the University of Cambridge. As he attended school there from 1931 to 1934, he developed a certain respect for physics and, more specifically, quantum-mechanics in which he proved the central limit theorem. His accomplishment was so massive that he graduated as a fellow at the school. Alan Turing, using his extensive

This memorial commemorates Alan Turing and the other contributors of Bletchley Park. Turing was a British mathematician and cryptologist. It honors their creation of the computer that cracked the German coded messages. His deciphering of the messages saved approximately 14 million lives and shaved 2-4 years off of the war. After the war was over, his service was classified for many years and he never received the recognition he should have. In 1952 Turing was arrested for homosexuality and sentened to medications to reverse his homosexulaity, he commited suicide due to the medications. The memorial will honor Turing and the other Bletchley Park worker’s achievements.

There he earned his honors in Mathematics. In 1935 he was elected a fellow of the college by proving the Central Limit Theorem. In 1936, Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel’s results on the limits of proof and computation. He replaced Gödel’s complex formulations with simple hypothetical devices known to be as Turing Machines. This was all published in his paper called: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (1936). Turing proved that a theoretical universal machine, later to be known as the ‘Universal Turing Machine”, would be capable of performing any mathematical computation if it were given an algorithm. To this day, Turing machines are a central subject of study. September of 1936, Turing attended Princeton University where he studied cryptology. 1939 Alan Turing received his PhD from Princeton, and returned to

Alan Turing is a rare figure amongst the many historical worthies of post-war Britain. He would, at first, seem an unlikely candidate to become a popular icon. He worked within a comparatively novel and arcane scientific field, the central concepts of which are still only fully understood by specialists. It was one which emerged from mostly from his own high-level theoretical reasoning and debating the earlier work of the similarly obscure Kurt Gödel upon whether mathematical processes could truly solve any definable problem. 1 His life did not contain that many spectacular events, rather slow, grand, specific achievements that often seemed purely academic at the time. Many of these were not even publically known until after his death, due

Turing’s story of code breaking and his much less known but equally fundamental article “The

Turing faced a lot of discrimination late in his life and he never let it stop him from reaching for his dreams. Even after losing his security clearance and losing his job, he didn’t give up. When thinking of all the obstacles he overcame in such a brief period of time reminds me to keep moving forward no matter who or what gets in my way.

It is easy to tell that Turing is more than just a computer scientist. He left his legacy in the world by creating a decryption machine capable of breaking the Enigma Code, designing the programming for the Ferranti Mark I, coming up with the theory of Morphogenesis, and proposing the idea of artificial life. Turing’s creation of the decryption machine, Bombe, helped shorten the war by approximately two to four years. This is estimated to have saved millions of lives. The Turing Machine was the first machine that was able to perform complicated mathematical functions. After World War II was over Turing shifted his focus toward computers. Turing designed the Automatic Computing Engine that would have had a memory comparable to that of an early Macintosh Computer. When Turing could see his work at the National Physical Laboratory was going nowhere, he transferred to work on the Manchester Computer Project, designing the programming for the Ferranti Mark I. Once Turing had completed the programming for the Ferranti Mark I he used this computer to come up with the theory of morphogenesis which is the pattern formation that takes place in animals and plants to determine where the anterior and posterior regions should be located. After Turing had done his work in the field of biology doing work on morphogenesis he took up yet another career path,

Within the last thirty years, the pioneering British computer scientist and Cambridge academic Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) has undergone an astonishing cultural reappraisal. Turing was never particularly famous during his own lifetime, and almost forgotten for two decades after his passing. But his work on cryptography at Bletchley Park, his key 1937 paper On Computable Numbers, and his early digital machines such as the programmable Pilot ACE and his 1947-1954 work at the University of Manchester was unquestionably used and appreciated while he still lived, although not always publicly. 1 Turing's contributions were also long acknowledged within his own discipline as an indispensable foundation for greater achievement. The Association for Computing Machinery awarded the prestigious A.M. Turing prize for superlative excellence as early as 1966, for example. 2

World War II was a time of many technological advancements in the world. Among these advancements was the creation of the atomic bomb and semi-automatic rifle. Yet arguably the most important advancement was the Enigma, a cipher machine used by the Germans. A cipher is a way of encrypting messages, which is especially important in war. Enigma gave Germans’ confidence in the secrecy of their messages and plans, so they sent all of their messages using Enigma. This machine made German messages seem seemingly unbreakable, yet that was not the case. It took many years and the work of many different countries and people to create another machine able to break the code. Despite Enigma being unbreakable for many years and a great

From her differentiating characteristics of cognitive function Priestly exhibited superior levels of information quantity, retentiveness, comprehension, interests, curiosity, language development, processing information and thought processes (Clark 2013, p. 47). The only one he does not meet is “high level of verbal ability” (p. 47). One of the most telling is a “heightened capacity for seeing unusual and diverse relationships, integration of ideas and disciplines” (p48). As a part time scientist he changed the world of chemistry permanently by seeing what others had overlooked. He created devices that were so elegant, others could easily reproduce and verify his work (McEvoy, 2014). On Clark’s list of affective functions, idealism and a sense of justice (p. 49) appeared at an early age, which was assisted by his mother’s strong morals (Holt, 1931, p.

In the movie The Imitation Game there were many factors of the movie that were true and false in Alan Turing’s life. Although, most of his work is shrouded in mystery, we still have quite a bit of history on the man. Firstly, in the movie, we are showed that Alan has feelings for his dear friend Christopher and that Turing attends an all-boys-academy. This, in fact, is true. Christopher did genuinely exist and the school at which they attended was called Sherborne School in Dorset. In the film we learned that Alan Turing was a homosexual, scared and closeted about his true identity. Once more, this is another true fact. Unfortunately, Turing was in a time period where being gay was a disgrace and outlawed in England. He was convicted in 1952

His death is still shrouded in mystery, whether it was a real suicide, or a murder covered up to look like to a suicide. Either way, his death silenced the people of his generation. He was an inspiration to millions of people across the world, and his death came as a shock.

However, Turing is competitively unusual for a pioneer of computing. He has travelled from the position of being practically unknown outside of the rarefied world of historical computer science to an important cultural figurehead and point of political reference in lay society in the last three decades. Similar technical mathematicians of the period

And for his interesting facts are that he loved people and he wrote 40 books.He wrote so many book, and novels. He has known talents but writing books. But unfortunately he died in 1987 on dec.2