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Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)
Alan Mathison Turing was born in Paddington, London on 23 June, the son of a civil servant stationed in Madras, India. While his parents lived in India, Turing and his brother lived in various foster homes in Britain until he was fourteen, when his father retired from the civil service. Alan Turing had a passion for science from an early age, motivated largely by his receiving a copy of Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know and first manifested in a series of crude kitchen chemistry experiments. While he was successfully admitted to a public school, the schoolmaster believed he was wasting his time there and there were even fears he would not pass his graduation exam. Public schools at the time were geared more towards preparing upper-middle class young men for careers in law, medicine, accounting, or civil service, but not science. While still a student at public school, Turing met and befriended Christopher Morcom, a fellow student who was one year ahead of him. The friendship soon developed into a platonic love relationship, at least on Turing's part. Morcom's sudden death in 1930 had a profound effect on Turing. Though already an atheist, Turing became obsessed with the idea that Morcom's mind or spirit might have survived after death, and was still with him. He began investigating whether anything in science could support the notion of mind surviving separately from matter. At one point he consulted The Nature of the Physical World, one of the earliest treatises on quantum physics. This in turn led him to von Neumann's work into the logical foundations of quantum mechanics, which was the most mathematically intensive of the various schools of physics. By 1933 he was completely immersed in the study of mathematical logic. By 1935, he was completely immersed in the quest to find the answer to German mathematician Hilbert's Entscheidung, the question of whether any given mathematical assertion could be proven or disproved by a prescribed deductive process. In 1931 Turing enrolled in Kings College at Cambridge, where he pursued his passions for science and mathematics to an extent not possible during his years in public school. He also more heavily and openly explored his sexuality, befriending many in the gay circle of students at Cambridge and maintaining a four-year love relationship with fellow student James Atkins, who would later become the life partner of artist David Hutter. Contrary to the stereotypes of either the "math nerd" or "artistic" homosexual, Turing was an athletic young man during his days at Cambridge who enjoyed rowing, running, and sailing, and he in fact remained physically active throughout his life. Turing graduated from Kings College in 1934, and received a fellowship from the college the following year. In 1936 he received a Smith's Prize for his work in probability theory. Turing's investigations into the problem of the Entscheidung had by now resulted in his defining the exact method by which any given mathematical assertion could be proven or disproved by analogizing the process first with the mental process of a thinking human mind and then with the ordered procedures of a mechanical process. He conceived the idea of a machine which could perform the same methodical process of logical analysis and deduction as a human being analyzing a given problem, using a set order of situational instructions. His theories and arguments were formulated in his paper On Computable Numbers, but by the time it was complete his conclusions had already been arrived at independently by Alonzo Church, an American. Publication of Turing's paper was thus delayed for several months and he was compelled to acknowledge Church's work and lose credit for being the first to develop a method by which the Entscheidung problem could be solved. But while their conclusions were identical, their methodologies were different. Turing's machine was the first to be based on the computational processes and methods used by the human mind, and anticipated the computer program. His were thus the first theories of artificial intelligence. After receiving his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1938 and spending some time in the area of Ordinal Logic, Turing began studying ciphers and building cipher machines, partly motivated by the increasing possibility of war between Britain and Germany. Refusing a temporary post at Princeton, he returned to Cambridge in late 1938 where he worked in logic, number theory, and the philosophy of mathematics, and designed the gear wheels for computational machines. He sponsored a young German Jewish refugee's immigration to Britain and also began work for the Government Code and Cypher School, a special department of British Intelligence, where he worked on the problem of decoding the Enigma cipher codes used by the German military. After war was declared in September of 1939, Turing began working full-time at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the Cypher School. The arrival of Polish refugee scientists who had also been working on the Enigma problem proved instrumental in the cracking of the code, as Turing was able to take their device, called a Bombe, and expand it into a much more capable device, based on his own theories of the Turing machine. Using his own theories plus ideas suggested by Cambridge mathematician W.G. Welchman, Turing developed a machine which was able to decode any given message in Enigma code by first correctly decoding one portion of the text and proceeding from there. When improvements to the Enigma code by the Germans made the code more difficult to decipher, Turing rebuilt his machines along more electronic lines, allowing for faster analysis and calculation. In 1942 he traveled to the US to apply his methods to the encrypting of electronic messages between FDR and Churchill. His work in time was awarded with an OBE. Throughout the war Turing studied electronics with the intention of combining its principles with those of his Bombe to make his theoretical machines a reality, or as he put it, "building a brain." Unlike American scientists and engineers who were working along the same lines, he emphasized speed and believed information the machines would need for reference in working their calculations should be stored as encoded information rather than built into their components. He envisioned machines which could switch between different activities and tasks, which could expand their own programs (in essence, learn), and could be linked together in a network via remote terminals, an early precursor of the Internet. Turing even developed an early form of programming language, called Abbreviated Code Instructions. But when the first digital computers were developed by F.C. Williams at Manchester beginning in 1948, it was without any direct influence or involvement from Turing. While Turing did accept a post at the Manchester computing laboratory that same year, his position had little real meaning or responsibility, and was largely an act of charity. He pursued other interests, including cross-country training, and seriously entertained the idea of competing in the 1948 Olympics before an injury prevented his participation in the trials. Turner also became more conspicuous about his relations with other men at this time, becoming lovers with a Manchester student named Neville Johnson. In 1950 Turing published Computing Machineryand Intelligence and he was elected to the Royal Society in 1951. He also began pioneering work in the area of morphogenesis, specifically developing the basics of non-linear dynamical theory, and his paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis appeared in November of 1951. Disaster came for Turing in 1952. After a nineteen-year old man was arrested for burglarizing Turing's house, the man revealed to police that a friend of his had been a frequent sexual partner of Turing's. Alan Turing was arrested but at his arraignment maintained (correctly) that he had done nothing wrong. Turing was spared prison on the condition that he submit to a year long series of estrogen injections to kill his sex drive, one of many quack remedies believed by the gullible and bigoted to "cure" homosexuality. Thanks to the espionage and defection to the Soviet Union the previous year by gay lovers Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess and also to the idea, imported from America care of the self-hating closet cases J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, the British government now subscribed to the theory that anyone who was gay must automatically be a security risk. Because the work of the computing laboratory at Manchester was heavily involved with the British Atomic Bomb project, Turing was stripped of his security and fired from his post, even though his position carried little weight and he had little involvement with the lab's actual work. Turing soon found himself bereft of his research materials, his livelihood, his privacy, and many of his friends and colleagues. He was frequently spied upon and his every activity investigated. This combined with the estrogen injections threw him into a deep depression. Finally, on 7 June, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. His cleaning lady found him the following day. The country which Turing had worked so hard to protect and save just a decade earlier had essentially executed him for not conforming to its prejudices. A colleague would later comment, "we must muse on the savage price exacted by a society that without him might not have survived to demand it." Nearly fifty years after his death, society is beginning to show Turing long overdue gratitude. He is now recognized by most as the Father of Computer Science and the true inventor of the first digital computer. Andrew Hodges, a professor of mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford, who is himself openly gay, wrote Alan Turing: The Enigma, the definitive biography of Turing, in 1983. In 1994 a section of road in Manchester was renamed "Alan Turing Way." In 1996 Derek Jacobi portrayed Turing in the stage play Breaking the Code, and the actor started a fund for the construction of a memorial to Turing. The finished memorial, a bronze life-sized statue of Turing sitting on a bench with a notebook in his lap, was unveiled in 2000, on what would have been Turing's eighty-eighth birthday. That same year, Time magazine recognized Turing as one of the Top 100 Scientists and Thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Links: Time - Top 100 Scientists and Thinkers of the Twentieth Century
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