Alan turing brief biography of george

This early exposure laid the groundwork for his future contributions to these fields. During his time at Cambridge, he studied mathematics, ultimately receiving his degree in His remarkable dissertation proved the central limit theorem, which earned him a fellowship at King's College. This accomplishment marked the beginning of Turing's prominent academic career, as he continued to delve deeper into mathematical concepts that would later be foundational to computer science.

Alan Turing, a pivotal figure in the field of computer science, made remarkable contributions during World War II, particularly in the realm of cryptanalysis. Working at Bletchley Park, the principal location for British code-breaking efforts, Turing was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code, which was crucial for intercepting and interpreting Nazi communications.

His development of the Bombe machine, which expedited the decoding of these messages, provided the Allied forces with invaluable intelligence. It is estimated that Turing's efforts significantly shortened the war, saving countless lives. In addition to his mechanical innovations, Turing's theoretical advancements laid the groundwork for modern computing systems.

His work on algorithms and his concept of the Universal Turing Machine serve as foundational principles in the development of contemporary computer science and artificial intelligence. Turing's thorough understanding of mathematical logic allowed him to formulate strategies that transcended mere machine operation; they defined how computation itself should conceptualize problems and solutions.

Through his contributions during the war, Turing not only positioned himself as a hero of his time but also established a legacy that continues to shape technology today. Alan Turing's contributions to cryptanalysis during World War II were nothing short of revolutionary. He played a pivotal role at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking center, where he spearheaded efforts to decipher the German Enigma machine.

Turing designed the Bombe, an electromechanical device that significantly expedited the decryption of Enigma-encoded messages. His analytical approach and innovative designs laid the groundwork for modern cryptology, showcasing the importance of algorithmic thinking in solving complex problems. His boyhood scientific interests were a trial to his mother whose perpetual terror was that he would not be acceptable to the English Public School.

At twelve he expressed his conscious fascination with using 'the thing that is commonest in nature and with the least waste of energy,' presentiment of a life seeking freshly minted answers to fundamental questions. Despite this, he was successfully entered for Sherborne School. The headmaster soon reported: "If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.

Matter and Spirit Turing's private notes on the theory of relativity showed a degree-level appreciation, yet he was almost prevented from taking the School Certificate lest he shame the school with failure. But it appears that the stimulus for effective communication and competition came only from contact with another very able youth, a year ahead of him at Sherborne, to whom Alan Turing found himself powerfully attracted in He, Christopher Morcom, gave Turing a vital period of intellectual companionship — which ended with Morcom's sudden death in February Turing's conviction that he must now do what Morcom could not, apparently sustained him through a long crisis.

For three years at least, as we know from his letters to Morcom's mother, his thoughts turned to the question of how the human mind, and Christopher's mind in particular, was embodied in matter; and whether accordingly it could be released from matter by death. This question led him deeper into the area of twentieth century physics, first helped by A.

Eddington's book The Nature of the Physical World, wondering whether quantum-mechanical theory affected the traditional problem of mind and matter. As an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge fromhe entered a world more encouraging to free-ranging thought. His reading of the then new work of von Neumann on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped the transition from emotional to rigorous intellectual enquiry.

At the same time, this was when his homosexuality became a definitive part of his identity. The special ambience of King's College gave him a first real home. His association with the so-called anti-War movement of did not develop into Marxism, nor into the pacifism of his friend and occasional lover James Atkins, then a fellow undergraduate mathematician, later musician.

He was closer in thought to the liberal-left economists J. Keynes and A. His relaxations were found not in the literary circles generally associated with the King's College homosexual milieu, but in rowing, running, and later in sailing a small boat. Turing's progress seemed assured, A distinguished degree in followed by a Fellowship of King's College in and a Smith's Prize in for work on probability theory, and he might then have seemed on course for a successful career as a mildly eccentric King's don engaged in pure mathematics.

His uniqueness of mind, however, drove him in a direction none could have foreseen. By Turing had already introduced himself to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and so to the then arcane area of mathematical logic. Bertrand Russell had thought of logic as a solid foundation for mathematical truth, but many questions had since been raised about how truth could be captured by any formalism.

InTuring learnt from the lecture course of the Cambridge topologist M. Newman that a further question, posed by Hilbert, still lay open. It was the question of Decidability, the Entscheidungsproblem. Could there exist, at least in principle, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable?

To answer such a question needed a definition of 'method' which would be not only precise but compelling. This is what Turing supplied. He analysed what could be achieved by a person performing a methodical process, and seizing on the idea of something done 'mechanically', expressed the analysis in terms of a theoretical machine able to perform certain precisely defined elementary operations on symbols on paper tape.

He presented convincing arguments that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a 'definite method. In April he showed his result to Newman; but at the same moment the parallel conclusion of the American logician Alonzo Church became known, and Turing was robbed of the full reward for his originality.

His paper, On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, had to refer to Church's work, and was delayed until August However it was seen at the time that Turing's approach was original and different; Church relied upon an assumption internal to mathematics, rather than appealing to operations that could actually be done by real things or people in the physical world.

Subsequently, the concept of the Turing machine has become the foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability. Turing worked in isolation from the powerful school of logical theory centred on Church at Princeton University, and his work emerged as that of a complete outsider. One can only speculate, but it looks as if Turing found in the concept of the Turing machine something that would satisfy the fascination with the problem of Mind that Christopher Morcom had sparked; his total originality lay in seeing the relevance of mathematical logic to a problem originally seen as one of physics.

In this paper, as in so many aspects of his life, Turing made a bridge between the logical and the physical worlds, thought and action, which crossed conventional boundaries. His work introduced a concept of immense practical significance: the idea of the Universal Turing Machine. The concept of 'the Turing machine' is like that of 'the formula' or 'the equation'; there is an infinity of possible Turing machines, each corresponding to a different 'definite method' or algorithm.

But imagine, as Turing did, each particular algorithm written out as a set of instructions in a standard form. Then the work of interpreting the instructions and carrying them out is itself a mechanical process, and so can itself be embodied in a particular Turing machine, namely the Universal Turing machine. A Universal Turing machine can be made do what any other particular Turing machine would do, by supplying it with the standard form describing that Turing machine.

One machine, for all possible tasks. It is hard now not to think of a Turing machine as a computer program, and the mechanical task of interpreting and obeying the program as what the computer itself does. Thus, the Universal Turing Machine embodies the essential principle of the computer: a single machine which can be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with the appropriate program.

Additionally, the abstract Universal Turing Machine naturally exploits what was later seen as the 'stored program' concept essential to the modern computer: it embodies the crucial twentieth-century insight that symbols representing instructions are no different in kind from symbols representing numbers. But computers, in this modern sense, did not exist in Turing created these concepts out of his mathematical imagination.

He ran in the A. Marathon in and was placed fifth. By Newman was the professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester and he offered Turing a readership there. Turing resigned from the National Physical Laboratory to take up the post in Manchester. Newman writes in [ 13 ] that in Manchester The expectation was that Turing would lead the mathematical side of the work, and for a few years he continued to work, first on the design of the subroutines out of which the larger programs for such a machine are built, and then, as this kind of work became standardised, on more general problems of numerical analysis.

In Turing published Computing machinery and intelligence in Mind. It is another remarkable work from his brilliantly inventive mind which seemed to foresee the questions which would arise as computers developed. He studied problems which today lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. It was in this paper that he proposed the Turing Test which is still today the test people apply in attempting to answer whether a computer can be intelligent [ 1 ] Turing's view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.

Turing did not forget about questions of decidability which had been the starting point for his brilliant mathematical publications. One of the main problems in the theory of group presentations was the question: given any word in a finitely presented groups is there an algorithm to decide if the word is equal to the identity. Post had proved that for semigroups no such algorithm exist.

Turing thought at first that he had proved the same result for groups but, just before giving a seminar on his proof, he discovered an error. He was able to rescue from his faulty proof the fact that there was a cancellative semigroup with insoluble word problem and he published this result in Boone used the ideas from this paper by Turing to prove the existence of a group with insoluble word problem in Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London inmainly for his work on Turing machines in By he was working on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms.

In he published the first part of his theoretical alan turing brief biography of george of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms. Turing was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in when he reported to the police details of a homosexual affair. He had gone to the police because he had been threatened with blackmail.

He was tried as a homosexual on 31 Marchoffering no defence other than that he saw nothing wrong in his actions. Found guilty he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year. He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic pursuits. On 10 Septemberthe British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing had been treated after the war.

Not only did he press forward with further study of morphogenesis, but he also worked on new ideas in quantum theory, on the representation of elementary particles by spinors, and on relativity theory. Although he was completely open about his sexuality, he had a further unhappiness which he was forbidden to talk about due to the Official Secrets Act.

With the cold war this became an important operation and Turing continued to work for GCHQ, although his Manchester colleagues were totally unaware of this. After his conviction, his security clearance was withdrawn. Worse than that, security officers were now extremely worried that someone with complete knowledge of the work going on at GCHQ was now labelled a security risk.

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Alan turing brief biography of george

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