Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing was undoubtedly one of the greatest pioneers of our computer world.

We can clearly label him the founder of what we know today as modern computer science, but beyond that, he was also a great mathematician, a code-breaker, philosopher, and certainly a risk-taker. His contributions to society not only influenced the development of today’s computers, but also seriously impacted the outcome of a second world war.

Born on June 23, 1912 in London, England to Ethel and Julius Turing, Alan Turing showed very early signs of having an extraordinary mind. "At a very early age, he is said to have taught himself to read in only three weeks and his discovery of numbers brought about the distracting habit of stopping at every street light in order to find its serial number." 1 In school he proved to act just as any other great mind has had in the past. He could not adapt and conform to the way in which things were organized and put forth for him. He wanted to only follow his own rules and standards. He did, however excel in mathematics, but for that matter, it was only that subject which was of primary concern to him. Everything else seemed unimportant and therefore did not appeal to his attention. He was definitely a good student, but inconsistent for the most point, and he “often had to make up for poor classwork by getting high marks on exams held at the end of the semester” (Henderson, 90). Nevertheless, he went on to college – King’s College of Cambridge University in 1931, and then later to Princeton University from 1936 to 1938.

The era of his college years was also in interesting period in the realm of mathematics. Many things were and had been already changing. Mathematics was finding itself and it seemed that its rules could be fully used to find the solution to any problem. Unfortunately a known mathematician by the name of Kurt “Gödel, had proven that the axioms of mathematics never could be complete as well as consistent. This was a hard blow to many mathematicians that had been convinced that mathematics was a universal and complete system.” 2 And furthermore, there remained the question of decidability, that is, whether there was a method for deciding a mathematical statement to be provable or not.

Turing attacked this problem in his paper “On Computable Numbers” which was published in 1936.