Alan Turing - Math Genius, War Hero

Born in 1912, Turing was raised in England and graduated from Cambridge in 1934. He subsequently entered graduate school at Princeton, where he studied under Professor Alonzo Church and obtained a PhD. They published the Church-Turing thesis, a theory on the limits of computation.

Turing is widely recognized as the father of computer science because of his development of the mathematical idea of a Turing Machine. He developed the idea further and presented it as a General Turing Machine, a concept that is essentially the basis for most computers in the English-speaking world.

As the world fell into war in 1939, Turing took work with British intelligence at Bletchley Park. His job was to decipher German radio communications, which had been encrypted by a mechanical machine called the "Enigma." Hitler demanded control over the U-Boats at sea in the North Atlantic, so German engineers encrypted commands and messages that were then broadcast to the submarines. The gist of Turing's work was to decipher the intercepted radio transmissions, and in doing so he provided British intelligence with critical information such as the location of the U-Boats, intelligence that was used to sink the German subs.

After the war, Turing continued to work as a pioneer in the field of computer science. He formulated the Turing test, a test to determine whether a computer can be said to "think." Dr. Andrew Hodges, who has written widely about Turing, describes the Turing Test as follows: "Turing put forward the idea of an 'imitation game,' in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent, because we judge other people's intelligence from external observation in just this way... Turing's 'imitation game' is now usually called 'the Turing test' for intelligence."

Tragically, Turing was persecuted after the war because of his homosexuality. He was compelled to undergo chemotherapy, which led to depression and his apparent suicide in 1954. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently apologized posthumously to Turing for the unfair treatment.