Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912, died June 7th, 1954. He was an English cryptographer, Logician, and mathematician. He was most famous for his work in computer science and is often considered to be the father of the field (the modern field at least, inventors hundreds of years earlier invented computers of a highly mechanical nature).

During his childhood, Turing studied at ST. Michaels, and when he was 14 he attended the Sherborne School in Dorset. Despite a general labor strike stopping normal transportation, his love of learning led him to ride his bike sixty miles in an overnight trip to the school.

Throughout all his early education his mathematical genius shone through. At 16 he was able to reproduce some of Einstein's thought processes (in relation to Einstein's work on Newton's laws of motion) after merely reading the fundamentals of Einstein's work not quite as impressive as coming up with the stuff himself, but still more than excellent for a 16 year old.

Despite this genius, his lack of ambition in the English field meant that he failed to win a scholarship for the acclaimed Trinity College. Falling back on King's College he graduated in 1934 with a distinguished degree after studying deeply in the fields of science and mathematics.

In the years preceding WWII he accomplished a great deal. Directly after college he gave a dissertation on the Gaussian error function, and proceeded to write a paper which started work on what are now called Turing machines. The machines are to this day relevant in the study of computation theory and he stated that the machines would be able to solve any problem when in the form of an algorithm. When "oracles" were added to the machines they would be able to solve even more problems previously unsolvable to the Turing machines. Though more versatile, these machines did not gain much popularity because other, less adaptable machines performed quicker.

During WWII Turing was able to put his mathematical genius to good use when he helped break German ciphers such as the ciphers produced by the Enigma machine and the Lorenz SZ 40/42. During the war, Turing proposed to one Joan Clarke, though it never culminated in marriage (the relationship ended only a few months later).

After the war, Turing worked the development of an automatic computing engine (ACE), though he was not present when it was finally completed due to his year on sabbatical. Deviating slightly from his earlier work, he also developed the Turing test to help define at what point a machine becomes sentient. Parallel to this he wrote a chess program, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) which, oddly enough, lacked a computer powerful enough to run it at the time.

To clarify, the Turing test is a method that tests a machine's ability to think intelligently in novel situations. Specifically, the test involves a machine and a human who communicate through text in order to answer the questions of a second human, the judge. If the judge is unable to determine which is the machine and which the human with certainty, the machine is deemed sentient.

In the last years before his suicide (or very likely suicide, the case was somewhat unclear) by cyanide apple - likely due to a depression caused by his prosecution for homosexual acts and the following removal of security clearance - he spent his time working on morphogenesis, a field of mathematical biology. A large part of this work was in relating the Fibonacci sequence in plant structures.

Despite a loss of stature following the airing of his homosexual acts, he regained his fame posthumously with various colleges honoring him along with the city in which he worked, Manchester.

Sources

Wikipedia.com

Answers.com

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/