Alan Turing Biography

Alan Turing was a world-renowned pioneering and famous British mathematician and computer scientist. He excelled intellectually and studied abroad at Princeton University as an internationalist. His ideas continue to have an impact on our lives and serve as inspiration. Alan Mathison Turing was one of England's top mathematicians and computer scientists. He is credited with bringing WWII to a conclusion as a result of his efforts in AI and codebreaking, as well as his innovative Enigma machine.

Turing's life ended tragically. Turing lost his security clearance after being convicted of "indecency" for his sexual orientation, was medically castrated, and later committed suicide at the age of 41. We will learn who was Alan Turing in this Alan Turing short biography, or brief of Alan Turing Biography.

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Alan Turing Early Life & Education

Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London, to Julius and Ethel Turing. Julius was a civil servant who spent much of his career in India, but he and Ethel wanted to raise their children in the United Kingdom. Alan Turing educational background was gifted. When Alan turned thirteen, his parents enrolled him in the Sherborne School, a prominent boarding school in Dorset. However, the school's emphasis on a classical education clashed with Alan's inherent aptitude for math and science. Alan went on to university at King's College, Cambridge, where he was able to shine as a mathematician. He published a dissertation at the age of 22 that proved the central limit theorem, a mathematical theory that says that probability approaches such as bell curves, which work for normal statistics, can be applied to various types of problems. He also pursued studies in logic, philosophy, and cryptanalysis. In the next few years, he published numerous papers on mathematical theories while also building a universal machine – subsequently known as the Turing machine – that could solve every imaginable mathematical problem as long as it was provided as an algorithm. Turing then went on to Princeton University, where he earned a Ph.D.

Personal Life 

Turing began a love affair with Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old guy, in 1952. During a police investigation into a burglary at Turing's home, he admitted to being physically connected with Murray. Both men were tried and convicted of "gross indecency" in England since homosexuality was a crime. Turing was given the choice of a prison term or probation with "chemical treatment" to control his desire. He selected the latter and spent the following twelve months undergoing a chemical castration treatment. He became impotent as a result of the medication, and he developed gynecomastia, abnormal development of breast tissue. Furthermore, the British government removed his security clearance, and he was no longer able to work in the intelligence area.

Enigma

He was secretly working in government crypto-analysis in the years leading up to open hostilities in World War II. When England entered the war, he began on the full-time task of reconstructing the German Enigma machine's operation. The Germans were able to construct seemingly unbreakable codes because of this extremely complicated encryption generator. Turing welcomed the encryption challenge, developing the Bombe, a decoding computer designed specifically for Enigma. The deciphering of Enigma was a multi-year process that ended in 1942. The Allies were able to predict U-Boat deployment thanks to information obtained from decoded German signals, and therefore won the Battle of the Atlantic.

Work and Achievements

Turing is most recognized today for his role in the code-breaking successes at Bletchley Park during WWII. However, if we have a closer look at Alan Turing Biography, we understand that his accomplishments go far beyond decoding cryptography. Turing was a great pioneer in computing. In civilian life, he used his practical wartime experiences to create the Automatic Computing Engine, the design principles of which are still used in modern personal computers. He was also interested in biology, publishing works on the chemical foundation of morphogenesis. Many people consider his analytical style to be a precursor of the present discipline of data science.

Turing was a founding father of artificial intelligence and modern cognitive science, and he was an early proponent of the theory that the human brain is primarily a digital computer system. He proposed that from birth, the brain is an "unorganised machine" that, via "training," might be organised "into a universal machine or something like it." Turing proposed the Turing test as a method for evaluating whether an artificial computer is thinking (1950).

His research with the first generation of computers led to the fundamental ideas of artificial intelligence, outlined in an experiment known as the Imitation Game or, informally, the Turing Test. The game involves a human interrogator deciding which of two participants was human, based on written responses to questions. Turing believed that the machine might be acquiring human-like thoughts if it was impossible to distinguish the difference among respondents.

Last Days of Alan Turing’s Life

Turing was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in March 1951, a prestigious honour, but his life was about to get much more difficult. In March 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency”—that is, homosexuality, which was a crime in the United Kingdom at the time—and sentenced to 12 months of hormone “therapy.” With a criminal record, he would never be able to work for the British government's post-war code-breaking center, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Turing spent the rest of his brief career at Manchester, where he was appointed to a newly created readership in computing theory in May 1953. Turing began working on what is now known as artificial life in 1951. In 1952, he published “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” which detailed aspects of his research on the formation of form and pattern in living beings. Turing modeled his proposed chemical mechanism for the development of anatomical structure in animals and plants using Manchester's Ferranti Mark I computer. Turing was discovered dead in his bed, poisoned by cyanide, in the midst of this groundbreaking study. The official judgment was suicide, but at the 1954 inquest, no motive was uncovered. His death is frequently blamed on the hormone "therapy" he received.

Death & Legacy 

Turing's housekeeper discovered him dead in June 1954. He died of cyanide poisoning, according to a post-mortem study, and his death was deemed a suicide by an inquest. Nearby, a half-eaten apple was discovered. The apple was never tested for cyanide, but it was judged to be Turing's most likely technique.

In 2009, a British computer programmer started a petition urging the government to pardon Turing posthumously. After several years and several requests, Queen Elizabeth II exercised her royal mercy and signed a pardon overturning Turing's sentence in December 2013. One of Turing's notebooks, including 56 pages of data, was auctioned off by Bonhams in 2015 for a stunning $1,025,000. The British government widened Turing's pardon in September 2016 to exonerate thousands of other people imprisoned under previous indecency laws. The method is known popularly as the Alan Turing Law.

Recognition

Turing was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work shortly after World War II. Turing biographer Andrew Hodges unveiled an official English Heritage blue plaque at his childhood home on what would have been his 86th birthday. Turing's life-size statue was unveiled in June 2007 at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England. On the 50th anniversary of Turing's death, a bronze statue of him was unveiled at the University of Surrey on October 28, 2004. Turing was also recognised in a variety of other ways, particularly in Manchester, where he worked near the end of his life. Time magazine named him one of the "100 Most Important People of the 20th Century" in 1999, saying, "The reality is that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opens a spreadsheet or a word-processing application, is working on an iteration of a Turing machine." In 2002, Turing was placed 21st in a BBC nationwide survey of the "100 Greatest Britons." Turing has generally been recognised for his contributions to computer science, with many hailing him as the "founder" of the field.

Alan Turing was a man who was ahead of his time. This outstanding code-breaker helped shift the tide of World War II and was one of the founders of computer science. Turing was a creative genius who studied and contributed to the philosophical study of intelligence, biology, and physics. According to his biography, he was likewise a victim of anti-homosexual attitudes and regulations, losing his security clearance and committing suicide two years later. Turing was a founding father of artificial intelligence and modern cognitive science, and he was an early proponent of the theory that the human brain is primarily a digital computing machine. Turing was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in March 1951, a great honour, but his life was about to get much more difficult. Turing was discovered dead in his bed, poisoned by cyanide, in the midst of this groundbreaking study. The official conclusion was suicide, but at the 1954 inquest, no motive was found.