Biblograghy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

http://www.turing.org.uk/bio/part4.html

Alan Turing

Alan “Mathison” Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English Mathematician, logician cryptanalyst and computer scientist.

He was highly involved in the development of computer science providing new concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the “Turing” machine which is a disciple in the creation of the modern computer.

Turing is considered to be the Father of computer science and artificial intelligence, he had a high-pitched voice, a guy who talks all the time and somewhat donnish.

During WWII (1938-39) he was offered a place at Princeton by Von Neumann but he refused and went to Cambridge no University lectureship, he lived on his King's College fellowship, as logician and number theorist. Not usual for a mathematician, he joined in Wittgenstein's classes on the philosophy of mathematics, he then began to created gear-wheel parts for a special machine to calculate the Riemann Zeta-function which will come to be as the Enigma machine. He worked a part-timed job secretly for the Government code and cypher school where he appointed the first scientific input into a hitherto art based department.

Upon British declaration of war, Turing took up full-time work at the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters (British codebreaking Centre) in Bletchley Park. The Polish work was limited due to the fact that it depends on a very particular way that the Germans had been using the Enigma. For some time he was head of Hut 8 a section working on German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques of breaking down German ciphers including method of the (Turing-Welchman) bombe which is an electromechanical machine designed to find setting for the Enigma machine.

From 1940 onwards, the Turing-Welchman Bombe made reading of Luftwaffe signals routine. In contrast, the more complex Enigma methods the Germans used the more Naval communications were regarded as unbreakable. Happy to work alone on the problem that defeated mere others, Turing cracked the system but it required a few materials from the navy and the development of the sophisticated statistical processes before regular decryption could originally begin in mid-1941.

After WWII he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs of a program stored computer the ACE.

In 1948 he joined up with Max Newman’s computing laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in development of Manchester computers where he became interested in mathematical biology and even wrote a paper on chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov- Zhabotinsky reaction first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 when it is illegal in the United Kingdom, he accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) over prison. He died shortly in 1954 two weeks before his 42th birthday from cyanide poisoning.

Some believe he committed suicide his family believes it was an accident, it took up to 55 years (On 10 September 2009) before the British government on behalf of Gordon Brown apologized for the way they treated Alan Turing after WWII.          

Alan Turing

Alan “Mathison” Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English Mathematician, logician cryptanalyst and computer scientist.

He was highly involved in the development of computer science providing new concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the “Turing” machine which is a disciple in the creation of the modern computer.

Turing is considered to be the Father of computer science and artificial intelligence, he had a high-pitched voice, a guy who talks all the time and somewhat donnish.

During WWII (1938-39) he was offered a place at Princeton by Von Neumann but he refused and went to Cambridge no University lectureship, he lived on his King's College fellowship, as logician and number theorist. Not usual for a mathematician, he joined in Wittgenstein's classes on the philosophy of mathematics, he then began to created gear-wheel parts for a special machine to calculate the Riemann Zeta-function which will come to be as the Enigma machine. He worked a part-timed job secretly for the Government code and cypher school where he appointed the first scientific input into a hitherto art based department.

Upon British declaration of war, Turing took up full-time work at the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters (British codebreaking Centre) in Bletchley Park. The Polish work was limited due to the fact that it depends on a very particular way that the Germans had been using the Enigma. For some time he was head of Hut 8 a section working on German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques of breaking down German ciphers including method of the (Turing-Welchman) bombe which is an electromechanical machine designed to find setting for the Enigma machine.

From 1940 onwards, the Turing-Welchman Bombe made reading of Luftwaffe signals routine. In contrast, the more complex Enigma methods the Germans used the more Naval communications were regarded as unbreakable. Happy to work alone on the problem that defeated mere others, Turing cracked the system but it required a few materials from the navy and the development of the sophisticated statistical processes before regular decryption could originally begin in mid-1941.

After WWII he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs of a program stored computer the ACE.

In 1948 he joined up with Max Newman’s computing laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in development of Manchester computers where he became interested in mathematical biology and even wrote a paper on chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov- Zhabotinsky reaction first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 when it is illegal in the United Kingdom, he accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) over prison. He died shortly in 1954 two weeks before his 42th birthday from cyanide poisoning.

Some believe he committed suicide his family believes it was an accident, it took up to 55 years (On 10 September 2009) before the British government on behalf of Gordon Brown apologized for the way they treated Alan Turing after WWII.