Alan Turing was born in London on 23 June 1912. He was the son of Julius MathiusTuring and Ethel Sara Stoney, the youngest of three children, he was born to adistinguished family. His family background includes diplomats and engineers,three of which succeeded to the Royal Society. Alan turing was educated atSherbourne school, from 1923 to 1931.
After which he studied mathematics atKings College, Cambridge, graduating in 1935 with a B.A. He was elected a fellowof the college on the strength of his paper "On the Gaussian errorfunction", it won a Smiths prize for mathematics in 1936. Turing wasbrilliant and slightly headstrong, he discovered the central limit theorem forhimself, after it had been already discovered and proved. Later in 1936 he wentto the United States of America to study at Princeton University for two yearswith Alonso Church.
Turing worked on the theory of computation and in 1937, hepresented the paper for which he was to become famous, to the LondonMathematical Society. The paper "On computable numbers with an applicationto the Entscheidungsproblem", proved that a class of mathematical problemsexisted which could not be solved by automatic machines and introduced theconcept of a theoretical "universal" computing machine (the Turingmachine). Turing was awarded a Ph.D.
degree for this paper by PrincetonUniversity. Alan Turing returned to Kings College in 1938 and when war broke outin 1939, he began work for the government code and cipher school at BletchleyPark. In 1946 Turing was awarded an O.B.
E. for designing machines to break theGerman Enigma codes. After the war Turing declined ffer of a lectureship atCambridge, to join the mathematics division of the National Physics Laboratoryat Teddington, where he began to design the general computer called theAutomatic Computing Engine (ACE). In 1948 Turing was appointed reader in thetheory of computation at the University of Manchester and made assistantdirector of Manchester Automatic Digital Machine (MADAM).
Two years later Turingpublished a paper in "Mind" entitled "computing machinery andintelligence". In the paper Turing concluded that by his definition ofthinking, it was possible to make intelligent machines. uring's last years werespent working at home. In 1952 he published the "Chemical basis ofmorphogenesis", it applied mathematical and mechanical theory to biology.Alan Turing died from self administered poisoning on 7 June 1954.
Alan Turing'splace in history was earned by his theory of computation which he worked out in1936 and 1937.
