Alan Turing ( )

Early Biography Born on June 23, 1912 in London, England Attended a prestigious public school where he showed promise in math and science but neglected the “classics” Later attended King's College in Cambridge, his second choice, after failing to get into Trinity College

Turing Machines Around 1936 Turing developed the concept of a device that could read and manipulate symbols on a strip of tape Turing used this to address the Entscheidungsproblem,which he found “undecidable” The concept of a Turing Machine is used as the basis for all computers today Machines capable of performing all the operations a Turing Machine could theoretically do are said to be “Turing complete”

World War II Turing headed the code-breaking efforts in England to crack the German “Enigma machine” Developed a machine that cracked the code by contradiction Named an “Officer of the Order of the British Empire”

After the War Turing began work on the Automatic Computing Engine Devised the Turing Test thought experiment while working on one of the first stored-program computers Wrote a chess program before there existed any computer capable of running it Later turned to mathematical biology, specifically the appearance of the Fibonacci sequence in nature

Homosexuality & Death In 1952 Turing was convicted of being a homosexual Underwent hormone therapy to avoid going to prison Two years later he was found dead of an apparent suicide by cyanide poisoning On September 10, 2009, the British government released an official apology to their treatment of Turing

Bibliography 20Articles/codebreaker.html htm