Turing, Alan Mathison, 1912-1954

Variant names

Dates:

Birth 1912-06-23

Death 1954-06-07

Nationality: Britons

Language: English

Biographical notes:

Alan Mathison Turing, code breaker and computer science pioneer (born June 23, 1912, London, England-died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire, England), read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge. He was elected Fellow of King's in 1935. He began research in mathematical logic which led to his well-known work on computable numbers and the 'Turing Machine.' He spent two years at Princeton University, 1936-1938, working with A. Church, and the war years at Bletchley Park, at the Code and Cypher School, 1939-1945, and was awarded the OBE for his work on 'Enigma' and other codes. At the end of the war he declined a Cambridge University Lectureship and joined the group that was being formed at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington for the design, construction and use of a large automatic computing machine. In his three years at the NPL, 1945-1948, he made the first design of the ACE computer and did much of the pioneering work in the design of sub-routines. In 1948 he was appointed Reader in Mathematics at Manchester University where work was beginning on the construction of a large computer by F. C. Williams and T. Kilburn. Towards the end of his life Turing was increasingly interested in morphogenesis. He was elected FRS in 1951.