Personally, I believe that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not by the same kind of body as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body can hold on to a 'spirit', whilst the body is alive and awake the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies, the 'mechanism' of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately.

After Sherborne, Turing studied as an undergraduate from to at King's College, Cambridge , where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. In , at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow of King's College on the strength of a dissertation in which he proved a version of the central limit theorem. Despite this, the committee found Turing's methods original and so regarded the work worthy of consideration for the fellowship.

Abram Besicovitch 's report for the committee went so far as to say that if Turing's work had been published before Lindeberg's, it would have been "an important event in the mathematical literature of that year". In , Turing published his paper " On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ". The Entscheidungsproblem decision problem was originally posed by German mathematician David Hilbert in Turing proved that his "universal computing machine" would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

He went on to prove that there was no solution to the decision problem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable : it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever halt. This paper has been called "easily the most influential math paper in history". Although Turing's proof was published shortly after Alonzo Church 's equivalent proof using his lambda calculus , [53] Turing's approach is considerably more accessible and intuitive than Church's.

According to the Church—Turing thesis , Turing machines and the lambda calculus are capable of computing anything that is computable. John von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing's paper. From September to July , Turing spent most of his time studying under Church at Princeton University , [4] in the second year as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow.

In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. John von Neumann wanted to hire him as his postdoctoral assistant , but he went back to the United Kingdom. When Turing returned to Cambridge, he attended lectures given in by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. During the Second World War, Turing was a leading participant in the breaking of German ciphers at Bletchley Park.

The historian and wartime codebreaker Asa Briggs has said, "You needed exceptional talent, you needed genius at Bletchley and Turing's was that genius. Turing's approach was more general, using crib-based decryption for which he produced the functional specification of the bombe an improvement on the Polish Bomba. Specifying the bombe was the first of five major cryptanalytical advances that Turing made during the war.

By using statistical techniques to optimise the trial of different possibilities in the code breaking process, Turing made an innovative contribution to the subject. A GCHQ mathematician, "who identified himself only as Richard," said at the time that the fact that the contents had been restricted under the Official Secrets Act for some 70 years demonstrated their importance, and their relevance to post-war cryptanalysis: [72].

The papers detailed using "mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible. Richard said that GCHQ had now "squeezed the juice" out of the two papers and was "happy for them to be released into the public domain". Turing had a reputation for eccentricity at Bletchley Park. He was known to his colleagues as "Prof" and his treatise on Enigma was known as the "Prof's Book". In the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off.

His bicycle had a fault: the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in time to adjust the chain by hand. Another of his eccentricities is that he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent it being stolen. Peter Hilton recounted his experience working with Turing in Hut 8 in his "Reminiscences of Bletchley Park" from A Century of Mathematics in America: [76].

It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts.

However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.

Hilton echoed similar thoughts in the Nova PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets. While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner , occasionally ran the 40 miles 64 km to London when he was needed for meetings, [78] and he was capable of world-class marathon standards.

His tryout time for the marathon was only 11 minutes slower than British silver medallist Thomas Richards' Olympic race time of 2 hours 35 minutes. He was Walton Athletic Club's best runner, a fact discovered when he passed the group while running alone. I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; it's the only way I can get some release. Due to the problems of counterfactual history , it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war.

At the end of the war, a memo was sent to all those who had worked at Bletchley Park, reminding them that the code of silence dictated by the Official Secrets Act did not end with the war but would continue indefinitely. Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, [68] Turing had specified an electromechanical machine called the bombe , which could break Enigma more effectively than the Polish bomba kryptologiczna , from which its name was derived.

The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman , became one of the primary tools, and the major automated one, used to attack Enigma-enciphered messages. The bombe searched for possible correct settings used for an Enigma message i.

For each possible setting of the rotors which had on the order of 10 19 states, or 10 22 states for the four-rotor U-boat variant , [90] the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, implemented electromechanically. The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred and ruled out that setting, moving on to the next.

Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail. A contradiction would occur when an enciphered letter would be turned back into the same plaintext letter, which was impossible with the Enigma.

The first bombe was installed on 18 March By late , Turing and his fellow cryptanalysts Gordon Welchman , Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry were frustrated. Building on the work of the Poles , they had set up a good working system for decrypting Enigma signals, but their limited staff and bombes meant they could not translate all the signals. In the summer, they had considerable success, and shipping losses had fallen to under , tons a month; however, they badly needed more resources to keep abreast of German adjustments.

They had tried to get more people and fund more bombes through the proper channels, but had failed. On 28 October they wrote directly to Winston Churchill explaining their difficulties, with Turing as the first named. They emphasised how small their need was compared with the vast expenditure of men and money by the forces and compared with the level of assistance they could offer to the forces.

Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done. Turing decided to tackle the particularly difficult problem of German naval Enigma "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself". That same night, he also conceived of the idea of Banburismus , a sequential statistical technique what Abraham Wald later called sequential analysis to assist in breaking the naval Enigma, "though I was not sure that it would work in practice, and was not, in fact, sure until some days had actually broken.

Banburismus could rule out certain sequences of the Enigma rotors, substantially reducing the time needed to test settings on the bombes.

Turing travelled to the United States in November [] and worked with US Navy cryptanalysts on the naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington; he also visited their Computing Machine Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. The American Bombe programme was to produce Bombes, one for each wheel order.

I used to smile inwardly at the conception of Bombe hut routine implied by this programme, but thought that no particular purpose would be served by pointing out that we would not really use them in that way. Their test of commutators can hardly be considered conclusive as they were not testing for the bounce with electronic stop finding devices.

Nobody seems to be told about rods or offiziers or banburismus unless they are really going to do something about it. During this trip, he also assisted at Bell Labs with the development of secure speech devices. During his absence, Hugh Alexander had officially assumed the position of head of Hut 8, although Alexander had been de facto head for some time Turing having little interest in the day-to-day running of the section.

Turing became a general consultant for cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park. There should be no question in anyone's mind that Turing's work was the biggest factor in Hut 8's success. In the early days, he was the only cryptographer who thought the problem worth tackling and not only was he primarily responsible for the main theoretical work within the Hut, but he also shared with Welchman and Keen the chief credit for the invention of the bombe.

It is always difficult to say that anyone is 'absolutely indispensable', but if anyone was indispensable to Hut 8, it was Turing. The pioneer's work always tends to be forgotten when experience and routine later make everything seem easy and many of us in Hut 8 felt that the magnitude of Turing's contribution was never fully realised by the outside world.

In July , Turing devised a technique termed Turingery or jokingly Turingismus [] for use against the Lorenz cipher messages produced by the Germans' new Geheimschreiber secret writer machine.

This was a teleprinter rotor cipher attachment codenamed Tunny at Bletchley Park. Turingery was a method of wheel-breaking , i. Turingery and the statistical approach of Banburismus undoubtedly fed into the thinking about cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher , [] [] but he was not directly involved in the Colossus development. Following his work at Bell Labs in the US, [] Turing pursued the idea of electronic enciphering of speech in the telephone system.

In the latter part of the war, he moved to work for the Secret Service's Radio Security Service later HMGCC at Hanslope Park. At the park, he further developed his knowledge of electronics with the assistance of engineer Donald Bayley.

Together they undertook the design and construction of a portable secure voice communications machine codenamed Delilah.

In any case, Delilah was completed too late to be used during the war. Though the system worked fully, with Turing demonstrating it to officials by encrypting and decrypting a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, Delilah was not adopted for use. Between and , Turing lived in Hampton , London, [] while he worked on the design of the ACE Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory NPL. He presented a paper on 19 February , which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer.

Womersley , Superintendent of the NPL Mathematics Division, it "contains a number of ideas which are Dr. Turing's own". Although ACE was a feasible design, the effect of the Official Secrets Act surrounding the wartime work at Bletchley Park made it impossible for Turing to explain the basis of his analysis of how a computer installation involving human operators would work.

In late he returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year during which he produced a seminal work on Intelligent Machinery that was not published in his lifetime. It executed its first program on 10 May , and a number of later computers around the world owe much to it, including the English Electric DEUCE and the American Bendix G The full version of Turing's ACE was not built until after his death.

According to the memoirs of the German computer pioneer Heinz Billing from the Max Planck Institute for Physics , published by Genscher, Düsseldorf, there was a meeting between Turing and Konrad Zuse. The interrogation had the form of a colloquium. Participants were Womersley, Turing, Porter from England and a few German researchers like Zuse, Walther, and Billing for more details see Herbert Bruderer, Konrad Zuse und die Schweiz. In , Turing was appointed reader in the Mathematics Department at the Victoria University of Manchester.

A year later, he became deputy director of the Computing Machine Laboratory, where he worked on software for one of the earliest stored-program computers—the Manchester Mark 1. Turing wrote the first version of the Programmer's Manual for this machine, and was recruited by Ferranti as a consultant in the development of their commercialised machine, the Ferranti Mark 1. He continued to be paid consultancy fees by Ferranti until his death. The idea was that a computer could be said to "think" if a human interrogator could not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being.

In , Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. Champernowne , began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. By , the program was completed and dubbed the Turochamp. Instead, Turing "ran" the program by flipping through the pages of the algorithm and carrying out its instructions on a chessboard, taking about half an hour per move. The game was recorded. His Turing test was a significant, characteristically provocative, and lasting contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence, which continues after more than half a century.

When Turing was 39 years old in , he turned to mathematical biology , finally publishing his masterpiece " The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis " in January He was interested in morphogenesis , the development of patterns and shapes in biological organisms.

He suggested that a system of chemicals reacting with each other and diffusing across space, termed a reaction—diffusion system , could account for "the main phenomena of morphogenesis".

For example, if a catalyst A is required for a certain chemical reaction to take place, and if the reaction produced more of the catalyst A, then we say that the reaction is autocatalytic , and there is positive feedback that can be modelled by nonlinear differential equations. Turing discovered that patterns could be created if the chemical reaction not only produced catalyst A, but also produced an inhibitor B that slowed down the production of A.

If A and B then diffused through the container at different rates, then you could have some regions where A dominated and some where B did. To calculate the extent of this, Turing would have needed a powerful computer, but these were not so freely available in , so he had to use linear approximations to solve the equations by hand. These calculations gave the right qualitative results, and produced, for example, a uniform mixture that oddly enough had regularly spaced fixed red spots.

The Russian biochemist Boris Belousov had performed experiments with similar results, but could not get his papers published because of the contemporary prejudice that any such thing violated the second law of thermodynamics. Belousov was not aware of Turing's paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Although published before the structure and role of DNA was understood, Turing's work on morphogenesis remains relevant today and is considered a seminal piece of work in mathematical biology. found that in mice, removal of Hox genes causes an increase in the number of digits without an increase in the overall size of the limb, suggesting that Hox genes control digit formation by tuning the wavelength of a Turing-type mechanism.

Turing was published in In , Turing proposed marriage to Hut 8 colleague Joan Clarke , a fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst, but their engagement was short-lived. After admitting his homosexuality to his fiancée, who was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage. In January , Turing was 39 when he started a relationship with Arnold Murray, a year-old unemployed man.

Just before Christmas, Turing was walking along Manchester's Oxford Road when he met Murray just outside the Regal Cinema and invited him to lunch. On 23 January, Turing's house was burgled. Murray told Turing that he and the burglar were acquainted, and Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, he acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were criminal offences in the United Kingdom at that time, [] and both men were charged with " gross indecency " under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act Turing was later convinced by the advice of his brother and his own solicitor, and he entered a plea of guilty.

Turing and Murray, was brought to trial on 31 March His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido , known as "chemical castration.

The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused breast tissue to form , [] fulfilling in the literal sense Turing's prediction that "no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out". He was denied entry into the United States after his conviction in , but was free to visit other European countries. In the s, Turing became worried about losing his savings in the event of a German invasion. In order to protect it, he bought two silver bars weighing 3, oz 90 kg and worth £ in , £8, adjusted for inflation, £48, at spot price and buried them in a wood near Bletchley Park.

This, along with the fact that the area had been renovated, meant that he never regained the silver. On 8 June , at his house at 43 Adlington Road, Wilmslow , [] Turing's housekeeper found him dead. He had died the previous day at the age of Cyanide poisoning was established as the cause of death.

An inquest determined that he had committed suicide. Both men noted that in Leavitt's words he took "an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Queen immerses her apple in the poisonous brew". Philosopher Jack Copeland has questioned various aspects of the coroner's historical verdict. He suggested an alternative explanation for the cause of Turing's death: the accidental inhalation of cyanide fumes from an apparatus used to electroplate gold onto spoons.

The potassium cyanide was used to dissolve the gold. Turing had such an apparatus set up in his tiny spare room. Copeland noted that the autopsy findings were more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion of the poison. Turing also habitually ate an apple before going to bed, and it was not unusual for the apple to be discarded half-eaten.

He even set down a list of tasks that he intended to complete upon returning to his office after the holiday weekend.

It has been suggested that Turing's belief in fortune-telling may have caused his depressed mood. In mid-May , shortly before his death, Turing again decided to consult a fortune-teller during a day-trip to St Annes-on-Sea with the Greenbaum family. But it was a lovely sunny day and Alan was in a cheerful mood and off we went Then he thought it would be a good idea to go to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool. We found a fortune-teller's tent[,] and Alan said he'd like to go in[,] so we waited around for him to come back And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into a pale, shaking, horror-stricken face.

Something had happened. We don't know what the fortune-teller said[,] but he obviously was deeply unhappy. I think that was probably the last time we saw him before we heard of his suicide. In August , British programmer John Graham-Cumming started a petition urging the British government to apologise for Turing's prosecution as a homosexual.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

In December , William Jones and his Member of Parliament, John Leech , created an e-petition [] requesting that the British government pardon Turing for his conviction of "gross indecency": []. We ask the HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of "gross indecency". In , he was convicted of "gross indecency" with another man and was forced to undergo so-called "organo-therapy"—chemical castration. Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he'd done so much to save.

This remains a shame on the British government and British history. A pardon can go some way to healing this damage. It may act as an apology to many of the other gay men, not as well-known as Alan Turing, who were subjected to these laws. The petition gathered over 37, signatures, [] [] and was submitted to Parliament by the Manchester MP John Leech but the request was discouraged by Justice Minister Lord McNally , who said: [].

A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted.

It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence that now seems both cruel and absurd—particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

John Leech , the MP for Manchester Withington —15 , submitted several bills to Parliament [] and led a high-profile campaign to secure the pardon. Leech made the case in the House of Commons that Turing's contribution to the war made him a national hero and that it was "ultimately just embarrassing" that the conviction still stood.

On 26 July , a bill was introduced in the House of Lords to grant a statutory pardon to Turing for offences under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act , of which he was convicted on 31 March At the bill's second reading in the House of Commons on 29 November , Conservative MP Christopher Chope objected to the bill, delaying its passage. The bill was due to return to the House of Commons on 28 February , [] but before the bill could be debated in the House of Commons, [] the government elected to proceed under the royal prerogative of mercy.

On 24 December , Queen Elizabeth II signed a pardon for Turing's conviction for "gross indecency", with immediate effect. In September , the government announced its intention to expand this retroactive exoneration to other men convicted of similar historical indecency offences, in what was described as an " Alan Turing law ".

The law applies in England and Wales. Turing was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire in Turing has been honoured in various ways in Manchester , the city where he worked towards the end of his life. In , a stretch of the A road the Manchester city intermediate ring road was named "Alan Turing Way".

A bridge carrying this road was widened, and carries the name Alan Turing Bridge. A statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester on 23 June in Sackville Park , between the University of Manchester building on Whitworth Street and Canal Street. The memorial statue depicts the "father of computer science" sitting on a bench at a central position in the park.

Turing is shown holding an apple. The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text 'Alan Mathison Turing —', and the motto 'Founder of Computer Science' as it could appear if encoded by an Enigma machine : 'IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ'. However, the meaning of the coded message is disputed, as the 'u' in 'computer' matches up with the 'u' in 'ADXUO'. As a letter encoded by an enigma machine cannot appear as itself, the actual message behind the code is uncertain.

A plaque at the statue's feet reads 'Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, victim of prejudice'. There is also a Bertrand Russell quotation: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. In , Time magazine named Turing as one of the Most Important People of the 20th century and stated, "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.

A blue plaque was unveiled at King's College, Cambridge on the centenary of his birth on 23 June and is now installed at the college's Keynes Building on King's Parade. On 25 March , the Bank of England publicly unveiled the design for a new £50 note , featuring Turing's portrait, before its official issue on 23 June, Turing's birthday. Turing was selected as the new face of the note in following a public nomination process.

To mark the th anniversary of Turing's birth, the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee TCAC co-ordinated the Alan Turing Year in , a year-long programme of events around the world honouring Turing's life and achievements. The TCAC, chaired by S. Barry Cooper with Turing's nephew Sir John Dermot Turing acting as Honorary President, worked with the University of Manchester faculty members and a broad spectrum of people from Cambridge University and Bletchley Park.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. English mathematician and scientist — For other uses, see Turing disambiguation. OBE FRS. Turing c. Maida Vale , London, England. Wilmslow , Cheshire, England. University of Cambridge BA , MA Princeton University PhD. Cryptanalysis of the Enigma Turing's proof Turing machine Turing test Unorganised machine Turing pattern Turing reduction " The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis ".

Logic Mathematics Cryptanalysis Computer science Mathematical and theoretical biology [1]. University of Manchester Government Code and Cypher School National Physical Laboratory. Robin Gandy , [2] [3] Beatrice Worsley [4]. Main article: Bombe. Main article: Action This Day memo. Main article: Turingery. Main article: Alan Turing law. Main article: Legacy of Alan Turing. See also: List of things named after Alan Turing. Main article: Alan Turing Year. This article has an unclear citation style.

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Born in Maida Vale , London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge , with a degree in mathematics.

Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes—no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine , and went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In , he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University.

For a time he led Hut 8 , the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers , including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory , where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine ACE , one of the first designs for a stored-program computer.

In , Turing joined Max Newman 's Computing Machine Laboratory , at the Victoria University of Manchester , where he helped develop the Manchester computers [13] and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis [1] and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov—Zhabotinsky reaction , first observed in the s.

Despite these accomplishments, Turing was never fully recognised in Britain during his lifetime because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act. Turing was prosecuted in for homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment with DES , a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration , as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June , 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning.

An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. Following a public campaign in , the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way [Turing] was treated".

Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon in The term " Alan Turing law " is now used informally to refer to a law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.

Turing has an extensive legacy with statues of him and many things named after him , including an annual award for computer science innovations.

He appears on the current Bank of England £50 note , which was released on 23 June , to coincide with his birthday. A BBC series , as voted by the audience, named him the greatest person of the 20th century. Turing was born in Maida Vale , London, while his father, Julius Mathison Turing — , was on leave from his position with the Indian Civil Service ICS of the British Raj government at Chatrapur , then in the Madras Presidency and presently in Odisha state, in India.

John Robert Turing, from a Scottish family of merchants that had been based in the Netherlands and included a baronet. Turing's mother, Julius's wife, was Ethel Sara Turing née Stoney ; — , daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, chief engineer of the Madras Railways.

The Stoneys were a Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry family from both County Tipperary and County Longford , while Ethel herself had spent much of her childhood in County Clare. Julius's work with the ICS brought the family to British India, where his grandfather had been a general in the Bengal Army. However, both Julius and Ethel wanted their children to be brought up in Britain, so they moved to Maida Vale , [20] London, where Alan Turing was born on 23 June , as recorded by a blue plaque on the outside of the house of his birth, [21] [22] later the Colonnade Hotel.

Turing's father's civil service commission was still active and during Turing's childhood years, his parents travelled between Hastings in the United Kingdom [25] and India, leaving their two sons to stay with a retired Army couple. At Hastings, Turing stayed at Baston Lodge , Upper Maze Hill, St Leonards-on-Sea , now marked with a blue plaque. Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius that he was later to display prominently.

The location is also marked with a blue plaque. Turing's parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a primary school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea , from the age of six to nine.

The headmistress recognised his talent, noting that she has " had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius. Between January and , Turing was educated at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, an independent school in the village of Frant in Sussex now East Sussex.

The first day of term coincided with the General Strike , in Britain, but Turing was so determined to attend that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied 60 miles 97 km from Southampton to Sherborne, stopping overnight at an inn. Turing's natural inclination towards mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on the classics.

His headmaster wrote to his parents: "I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist , he is wasting his time at a public school". In , aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein 's work; not only did he grasp it, but it is possible that he managed to deduce Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.

At Sherborne, Turing formed a significant friendship with fellow pupil Christopher Collan Morcom 13 July — 13 February , [36] who has been described as Turing's "first love". Their relationship provided inspiration in Turing's future endeavours, but it was cut short by Morcom's death, in February , from complications of bovine tuberculosis , contracted after drinking infected cow's milk some years previously.

The event caused Turing great sorrow. He coped with his grief by working that much harder on the topics of science and mathematics that he had shared with Morcom. In a letter to Morcom's mother, Frances Isobel Morcom née Swan , Turing wrote:. I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy to which he introduced me as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little the same about me I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do.

Turing's relationship with Morcom's mother continued long after Morcom's death, with her sending gifts to Turing, and him sending letters, typically on Morcom's birthday.

I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this letter is just to tell you that I shall be thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here. Your affectionate Alan. Some have speculated that Morcom's death was the cause of Turing's atheism and materialism. In a later letter, also written to Morcom's mother, Turing wrote:. Personally, I believe that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not by the same kind of body as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body can hold on to a 'spirit', whilst the body is alive and awake the two are firmly connected.

When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies, the 'mechanism' of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately. After Sherborne, Turing studied as an undergraduate from to at King's College, Cambridge , where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. In , at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow of King's College on the strength of a dissertation in which he proved a version of the central limit theorem.

Despite this, the committee found Turing's methods original and so regarded the work worthy of consideration for the fellowship. Abram Besicovitch 's report for the committee went so far as to say that if Turing's work had been published before Lindeberg's, it would have been "an important event in the mathematical literature of that year".

In , Turing published his paper " On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ". The Entscheidungsproblem decision problem was originally posed by German mathematician David Hilbert in Turing proved that his "universal computing machine" would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. He went on to prove that there was no solution to the decision problem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable : it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever halt.

This paper has been called "easily the most influential math paper in history". Although Turing's proof was published shortly after Alonzo Church 's equivalent proof using his lambda calculus , [53] Turing's approach is considerably more accessible and intuitive than Church's. According to the Church—Turing thesis , Turing machines and the lambda calculus are capable of computing anything that is computable.

John von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing's paper. From September to July , Turing spent most of his time studying under Church at Princeton University , [4] in the second year as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. John von Neumann wanted to hire him as his postdoctoral assistant , but he went back to the United Kingdom.

When Turing returned to Cambridge, he attended lectures given in by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. During the Second World War, Turing was a leading participant in the breaking of German ciphers at Bletchley Park. The historian and wartime codebreaker Asa Briggs has said, "You needed exceptional talent, you needed genius at Bletchley and Turing's was that genius.

Turing's approach was more general, using crib-based decryption for which he produced the functional specification of the bombe an improvement on the Polish Bomba. Specifying the bombe was the first of five major cryptanalytical advances that Turing made during the war. By using statistical techniques to optimise the trial of different possibilities in the code breaking process, Turing made an innovative contribution to the subject.

A GCHQ mathematician, "who identified himself only as Richard," said at the time that the fact that the contents had been restricted under the Official Secrets Act for some 70 years demonstrated their importance, and their relevance to post-war cryptanalysis: [72]. The papers detailed using "mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible.

Richard said that GCHQ had now "squeezed the juice" out of the two papers and was "happy for them to be released into the public domain". Turing had a reputation for eccentricity at Bletchley Park. He was known to his colleagues as "Prof" and his treatise on Enigma was known as the "Prof's Book".

In the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off.

His bicycle had a fault: the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in time to adjust the chain by hand. Another of his eccentricities is that he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent it being stolen. Peter Hilton recounted his experience working with Turing in Hut 8 in his "Reminiscences of Bletchley Park" from A Century of Mathematics in America: [76].

It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts.

However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.

Hilton echoed similar thoughts in the Nova PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets. While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner , occasionally ran the 40 miles 64 km to London when he was needed for meetings, [78] and he was capable of world-class marathon standards. His tryout time for the marathon was only 11 minutes slower than British silver medallist Thomas Richards' Olympic race time of 2 hours 35 minutes.

He was Walton Athletic Club's best runner, a fact discovered when he passed the group while running alone.

Explore the Mac App Store. The closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America. Commodities often have the reverse behavior to equities, with higher implied volatility for higher strikes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. Miller Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation. Just trade in your eligible computer for credit or recycle it for free.

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