Alan Turing, 1912-1954 |
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Wikipedia article
"Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. With the Turing test, meanwhile, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE, although it was never actually built in its full form. In 1948, he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers."The Alan Turing Home Page Who was Alan Turing? Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time:
" Upon British declaration of war on 3 September [1939], Turing took up full-time work at the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters, Bletchley Park. The Polish work was limited as it depended upon the very particular way the Germans had been using the Enigma. One of their ideas was embodied in a machine called a Bomba. The way forward lay in Turing's generalisation of the Polish Bombe into a far more powerful device, capable of breaking any Enigma message where a small portion of plaintext could be guessed correctly. "The Time 100 article, 1999 While addressing a problem in the arcane field of mathematical logic, he imagined a machine that could mimic human reasoning. Sound familiar?
"If all Alan Turing had done was answer, in the negative, a vexing question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system cannot be proved within that system — a corollary to the proof that made Kurt Godel famous — had enormous consequences in the world at large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine — a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape of theoretically infinite length. As the scanner moved from one square of the tape to the next — responding to the sequential commands and modifying its mechanical response if so ordered — the output of such a process, Turing demonstrated, could replicate logical human thought.
"The device in this inspired mind-experiment quickly acquired a name: the Turing machine. "St. Andrews biography
"Together with another mathematician W G Welchman, Turing developed the Bombe, a machine based on earlier work by Polish mathematicians, which from late 1940 was decoding all messages sent by the Enigma machines of the Luftwaffe. The Enigma machines of the German navy were much harder to break but this was the type of challenge which Turing enjoyed. By the middle of 1941 Turing's statistical approach, together with captured information, had led to the German navy signals being decoded at Bletchley."
SECRETS OF WAR Episode Number 2: THE ULTRA ENIGMA A script (to be narrated by Charleton Heston) about the Enigma machine with some quotes by my friend Peter Hilton.
"WHEN YOU COMBINE NAZI STUPIDITY WITH THE GERMAN LOVE OF GOOD ORDER, YOU AGAIN GET SOMETHING WHICH IS VERY VULNERABLE BECAUSE IT MEANT NOT ONLY DID THEY SEND OUT THE GREAT STATEMENTS OF THEIR MARVELOUS VICTORIES EACH DAY, BUT THEY’VE SENT THEM OUT AT THE SAME TIME EACH DAY SO WE COULD IDENTIFY. NOT ONLY DID THEY SEND THEM OUT AT THE SAME TIME EACH DAY, BUT THEY SENT THEM OUT ON EVERY CHANNEL. SO IF WE WERE READING ONE CIPHER WE WOULD GET THE CLEAR AND WE WOULD USE THAT CLEAR TO OBTAIN KEY FOR ANOTHER CIPHER."
"BECAUSE OF THIS ARROGANCE, BECAUSE THEY DESPISED US SO MUCH, THEY HELD US IN SUCH CONTEMPT. THEY COULDN’T THINK THAT WE, THE UNTER MENCH, THE SUB-RACE, COULD POSSIBLY BE DECIPHERING MESSAGES ENCIPHERED BY THE UBER MENCH, THE SUPER RACE. I MEAN IT WAS JUST CONTRARY TO THEIR WHOLE PHILOSOPHY, AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT."
Reminiscences of Bletchley Park 1942-1945 by Peter Hilton, a chapter from A Century of Mathematics in America By Peter L. Duren, Richard Askey, and Uta C. Merzbach (Google books). Published by AMS Bookstore, 1988 ISBN 0821801244, 9780821801246
"In October 1941, a letter written by Alan Turing [and three others] addressed to Winston Churchill was handed in at 10 Downing Street. [It] requested Churchill to order a substantial increase in the Bletchley Park staff of cryptanalysts working on high-grade German ciphers."
"To his great credit, Churchill ignored the unorthodoxy of the approach, bypassing 'normal channels,' and initialed a minute to General Ismay demanding immediate action. This minute led eventually to the recruitment of a very fine team of young - and not so young - mathematicians to Bletchley Park, to work on decoding messages enciphered on the Enigma machine..."September 10, 2009. Prime Minister Gordon apologizes posthumously to Alan Turing on behalf of the British government.
NPR story Posthumous Apology For World War II Code-Breaker 4 minute version 1 minute version
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology Friday to Alan Turing, a World War II code-breaker who was later prosecuted for being gay. The apology came following an online petition started by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming, author of The Geek Atlas. Graham-Cumming says Turing is one of the great figures of mathematics and science in the 20th century.Gordon Brown: I'm proud to say sorry to a real war hero. His letter to the Telegraph, a leading UK newspaper.
"I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain's fight against the darkness of dictatorship: that of code-breaker Alan Turing."
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