Alan Turing's Contibutions During World War Two

Alan Turing has been called many things throughout his time; mathematician, cryptanalyst, and a computing pioneer are just a few of the titles placed upon his shoulders. He contributed to many fields, but he is hailed for his work in the field of mathematics, the computer science community, and his efforts in cryptography during World War II.

Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912 to a wealthy middle class family. His parents, Julius and Sara Turing had met in India and had previously had one other son with whom Turing spent his childhood. Alan’s rise to fame began after his acceptance into King’s College in 1931, by 1936 he had not only graduated with a distinguished degree in mathematics but had also received a Fellowship, or a member of a group of peers whom work together in the pursuit of knowledge, and was awarded the Smith’s Prize for his work on probability theory (Huertas).

With the introduction of Gödel’s paper in 1931, a whole new world of mathematics was open for Turing. In 1935 Turing became aware that the question of Decidability, or the Entscheidungsproblem, which asks could there exist a method or process by which it could be decided whether a given mathematical assertion was provable, was still open. He provided a negative answer by defining a definite method or an algorithm in today’s terms. He analyzed the characteristics of a methodical process and how to perform that process and expressed his findings in the terms of a theoretical machine that would be able to perform the operations on symbols on a paper tape. This correspondence between operations, the human mind and a machine that was designed to embody a certain physical form was Turing’s contribution (Huertas).

Shortly after his tenure and research at Kin...

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... on hold though when he was arrested in 1952 for a sexual scandal involving a young Manchester man. He was given the option of imprisonment or chemical castration, of which he chose castration by the injection of estrogen . All his previous contributions to the world of cryptography seemed to be for nothing as his access to secret cryptography projects was revoked due to the fear of KGB, or Russian Committee for State Security, could tempt gay males into divulging sensitive materials. It was a mere two years later when Alan Turing died after consuming an apple which had been dipped in cyanide. Though it is generally accepted that his death was a suicide, there were several people at the time who thought assassination should not be ruled out. This is brought about several conspiracy theories that Turing was poisoned to prevent the loss of any country secrets (Hodges).