Alan Turing

Alan Turing was born in London; his father worked in the Indian Civil Service, and he was raised largely by a foster family in England. At school he loved science and mathematics more than the classics his teachers preferred. At King's College, Cambridge, he proved important results in probability, and in 1936 he published On Computable Numbers, describing an imaginary machine, now called a Turing machine, that could carry out any calculation that can be written as a set of steps. This idea became a foundation of computer science. During the Second World War he worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's secret code-breaking center, where he led work on breaking messages sent with the German Enigma machine, especially naval codes, and designed the electromechanical Bombe used to find the daily settings. This work helped the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war he designed an early stored-program computer and in 1950 proposed a test of whether machines can think. In 1952 he was prosecuted for homosexual acts, then a crime in Britain. He died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning.

Alan Turing is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Became an atheist as a young man; biographers have linked this to the death of his close friend Christopher Morcom. Source: Wikipedia