| Alan Turing
b: London, England, United Kingdom, Jun 23, 1912
d: Cheshire, England, United Kingdom, Jun 7, 1954
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS, was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE.
It's not breaking the code that matters - it's where you go from there.Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition. We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. |