A Brief Review of his Biography
he name Alan Turing is probably not familiar to most people who read this text, but there are good reasons to consider him one of the most influential and interesting characters of the 20th century. Alan Mathison Turing was born on the 23rd of June 1912, in Paddington, London. Turing spent the first thirteen years of his life traveling between England and India, where his Father was a colonial civil servant. Upon a return to the United Kingdom, he became a student at the boarding school of Sherborne, where he met his first love; Christopher Morcom - a classmate who died of tuberculosis in 1930, a few weeks before graduating. He subsequently studied at King’s College (University of Cambridge) where he met Von Neumann whose invention; The Von Neumann machine - is still in use today in studies of concept designs and the architecture of computers, due 28
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Alan Turing (1912-1954)
to its simplicity. Turing graduated with honors in Mathematics from Cambridge, and thereafter worked in the then-emerging field of Quantum Mechanics. In April 1936 he published a famous article that introduced the concept of algorithm, and defined a calculating machine of infinite capacity known as the Turing Machine, which operated on the basis of a series of logical instructions. It is considered, therefore, to be the forerunner of modern computing and computing theory. He moved to the United States’ University of Princeton, where he worked with the logician Alonzo Church and received a PhD. in Mathematics. However in 1938 he returned to England to engage in a study of the very foundations of mathematics. This led to him working secretly for