Alan Turing

EARLY LIFE 

Alan Turing was born in Maida Vale, London on June 23, 1912. 

Alan's father was part of a family of merchants from Scotland, who was on leave from his position with the Indian Civil Service when his son was born. His mother, Ethel Sara, was the daughter of an engineer. 

Alan went to St. Michael's, a school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, when he was five years old. The headmistress recognized his talent straight away.

In the midst of Britain's General Strike of 1926, the 13-year-old Alan Turing started at Sherborne School, an independent boarding school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset. Because of the General Strike there was no transport in Britain, but Alan was so determined to make it to the first day of term, that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to Sherborne, stopping overnight at an inn.

As a schoolboy at Sherborne, Alan's teachers were slow to recognize his talents: his report cards show that they thought that although he showed "distinct promise" in mathematics, his ideas in physics were "vague" and messily explained.

Alan Turing aged 16

After Sherborne, Turing studied as an undergraduate from 1931 to 1934 at King's College, Cambridge,  where he was awarded first-class honors in mathematics. 

CAREER 

Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science and on November 30, 1936 he published the first details of the Turing machine, a basic abstract symbol-manipulating hypothetical device that could simulate the logic of any computer algorithm.

Turing was interested in artificial intelligence. He proposed the Turing test, which was an attempt to define a standard for when a machine can be called "intelligent". The idea was that a computer could be said to "think" if a human talking with it could not tell it was a machine.

During World War II, the pioneering British mathematician and computer scientist worked to break German ciphers. The initial design of the bombe, an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during the conflict was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park by Turing.

Using cryptanalysis, Turing helped to break the codes of the Enigma machine. After that, he solved other German codes. Turing's codebreaking work at Bletchley Park saved thousands of lives and became the foundation for modern computing. 

A wartime picture of a Bletchley Park Bombe

After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), among the first designs for a stored-program computer. Turing's paper which he presented on February 19, 1946 has been claimed to be the first detailed design of a stored-program computer.

There were delays in starting the project to build the ACE, so in late 1947 Turing returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year. While he was at Cambridge, the Pilot ACE was built without him. It ran its first program on May 10, 1950.

In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. 

Turing developed the first computer program for playing chess in 1951. However, no computer was powerful enough to process it, so Turing tested it by doing the calculations himself and playing according to the results, taking several minutes per move.

Turing's later work showed that the patterns on tortoise shells, despite their apparent complexity (and beauty), can come about from a rather simple set of rules or instructions, i.e. the underlying genetic code.

PERSONAL LIFE 

Turing was a gay man at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in England.

Fearing a German invasion, in 1940 Alan Turing converted his assets into silver ingots and buried them in Buckinghamshire. He spent the rest of his life failing to find them.

Turing

Alan Turing was a world class distance athlete with a personal best marathon time of 2:46:03, achieved in 1947. (2:36 won an Olympic gold in 1948). His local running club discovered him when he overtook them repeatedly while out running alone for relaxation.

LAST YEARS AND DEATH

Convicted in 1952 of homosexuality acts, Turing opted to receive chemical castration in lieu of prison. As a result of his punishment, he became impotent and also grew breasts.

In 1954, sixteen days before his 42nd birthday, Turing took his own life by means of cyanide poisoning. A half-eaten apple was discovered by Turing's bed when his body was found - though the apple was never tested it was speculated this was the method Turing used to administer the cyanide.

LEGACY

In 2009, after a huge internet campaign, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made on official apology to the Turing family and the LGBT community for the British government's treatment of Turing. Four years later, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon. 

The "Alan Turing law" is an informal term for the law in the United Kingdom, contained in the Policing and Crime Act 2017, which serves as an amnesty law to retroactively pardon men who were cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. Under the Alan Turing law more than 49,000 men in England and Wales were posthumously pardoned for breaching historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.

Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing in the 2014 movie about his life The Imitation Game. The actor's father, Timothy Carlton was also a student at Alan Turing's old school, Sherborne School, from 1953-1958. 

Source Daily Mail