Alan Turing, Mathematician, 1912 - 1954

Alan Turing, Mathematician, 1912 - 1954

Alan Turing was a mathematician who, in 1936, laid the theoretical groundwork for all of modern computer science before there was a working computer of any kind. Through a "thought experiment" called the Turing Machine, which reads, writes, and acts upon symbols on a tape according to a set of rules, Turing managed to embody all the theory that we would need to apply to computation in general.

During World War II, Turing and a group of British scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, working in the tightest possible secrecy at a country estate known as Bletchley Park, managed by 1943 to build a completely electronic computer. Colossus was designed for code-breaking, and it worked spectacularly well, possibly shortening the duration and almost certainly affecting the outcome of the war.


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