Alan Turing

Biography

Turing's 1936 paper introduced the concept of a programmable computer before any existed. At Bletchley Park he designed the Bombe machine that cracked Germany's Enigma cipher. Prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality, then illegal, he died two years later; he received a royal pardon in 2013 and now appears on the Bank of England £50 note.

English mathematician whose abstract 'universal machine' invented computing, and whose wartime codebreaking shortened the Second World War.

Known for

Founding computer science and breaking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

Notable works & defining projects

• On Computable Numbers (1936)
• The Bombe codebreaking machine
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Notable achievements

• His 1936 paper 'On Computable Numbers' founded theoretical computer science (the Turing machine)
• Led the Bletchley Park team whose Bombe machines broke the Enigma code
• Proposed the Turing Test for machine intelligence in 1950

Timeline

1. 1936Published the paper that defined the universal computer
2. 1940First Bombes began breaking Enigma traffic at Bletchley Park
3. 2013Received a posthumous royal pardon

Did you know?

• He was a talented long-distance runner, near Olympic standard, and sometimes ran the 40 miles to London meetings
• His image appears on the Bank of England £50 note, issued on his birthday in 2021