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Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ ˈ tj ʊər ɪ ŋ /; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. [5]
In 1936, Turing published a paper that is now recognised as the foundation of computer science. Turing analysed what it meant for a human to follow a definite method or procedure to perform a...
- Overview
- Early life and career
- The Entscheidungsproblem
- The Church-Turing thesis
- Code breaker
Alan Turing (born June 23, 1912, London, England—died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire) British mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
The son of a civil servant, Turing was educated at a top private school. He entered the University of Cambridge to study mathematics in 1931. After graduating in 1934, he was elected to a fellowship at King’s College (his college since 1931) in recognition of his research in probability theory. In 1936 Turing’s seminal paper “On Computable Numbers,...
What mathematicians called an “effective” method for solving a problem was simply one that could be carried by a human mathematical clerk working by rote. In Turing’s time, those rote-workers were in fact called “computers,” and human computers carried out some aspects of the work later done by electronic computers. The Entscheidungsproblem sought ...
An important step in Turing’s argument about the Entscheidungsproblem was the claim, now called the Church-Turing thesis, that everything humanly computable can also be computed by the universal Turing machine. The claim is important because it marks out the limits of human computation. Church in his work used instead the thesis that all human-computable functions are identical to what he called lambda-definable functions (functions on the positive integers whose values can be calculated by a process of repeated substitution). Turing showed in 1936 that Church’s thesis was equivalent to his own, by proving that every lambda-definable function is computable by the universal Turing machine and vice versa. In a review of Turing’s work, Church acknowledged the superiority of Turing’s formulation of the thesis over his own (which made no reference to computing machinery), saying that the concept of computability by a Turing machine “has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness…evident immediately.”
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Having returned from the United States to his fellowship at King’s College in the summer of 1938, Turing went on to join the Government Code and Cypher School, and, at the outbreak of war with Germany in September 1939, he moved to the organization’s wartime headquarters at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. A few weeks previously, the Polish governm...
May 30, 2024 · Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954) was a talented British mathematician and logician whose work laid the foundation for modern computer science and artificial intelligence.
A Turing machine is an idealised model of a central processing unit (CPU) that controls all data manipulation done by a computer, with the canonical machine using sequential memory to store data. Typically, the sequential memory is represented as a tape of infinite length on which the machine can perform read and write operations.
Alan Turing was one of the most influential British figures of the 20th century and often considered the father of modern computer science.
Oct 18, 2024 · In 1945, the war over, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to create an electronic computer. His design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the first complete specification of an electronic stored-program all-purpose digital computer .
