Alan Mathison 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 вЂ" 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 “GÐ"¶del, 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. In his paper, he developed an imaginary machine that looked like a typewriter and was

capable of performing many different types of complex mathematical operations. Basically the

machine performed on the basis of 1’s and 0’s, something that we are all very familiar with today.

The machine worked in the way that it had an endless tape attached to it. On the tape there were a

series of squares where in each square there would be either placed a 1, or the square would be left

blank, similar to placing a zero. And so, the tape would move back and forward one space at a time

reading the instructions вЂ" if there was a “1” it would do some type of instruction, if there was a “0”,

it would do another instruction, and so forth. (Basically the same methodology used today by our

modern-day computers). This was definitely a revolutionary concept for that time, because what

Turing envisioned was a computer that could perform any set of tasks if programmed correctly.

When computers finally emerged around the 1950’s all they could do was perform a specific set of

tasks, nothing beyond that. It was Alan Turing that said “We do not need an infinity of different

machines doing different jobs. A single one will suffice. The engineering problem of producing

various machines for various jobs is replaced by the office work of programming the universal

machine to do these jobs.” Unfortunately, at that time “no one recognized that Turing’s machine

provided a blueprint for what would eventually become the electronic digital computer” (P. of the

Century, 279).

In the midst of what was going on, WW II broke out on September 3rd , 1939. By this time

Turing had already graduated from Princeton and was now recruited to work secretly for the British

Government Code and Cypher School. During the war, the Germans were using a very elaborate

machine known as the Enigma, to turn any information they needed to communicate into coded

messages. This method is known as ciphering. Their machine had a complex construction giving it

the ability to have “trillions of possible settings”,