Biography of Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London, England. His family was not overtly rich, but still considered to be upper-middle class. His early education was at the Sherborne School (1926-1931) were he fostered an interest in physics. After graduating, he entered King’s College in Cambridge, England to study quantum mechanics. This is also the scene where he discovered his homosexuality.

He earned a distinguished degree in 1934, followed by admission to the Fellowship of King’s College in 1935 and earning the Smith’s Prize in 1936 for his work on the probability theory. He developed the theoretical computer, the Turing machine, to answer the scientific question of Decidability. This earned him some early fame, but similar breakthroughs detracted from his discovery.

As war with Germany loomed, Turing moved his career to Princeton. He was decidedly anti-war, but he was not a pacifist. He went to work for the Government Code and Cipher School, and built a cipher machine. The Turing-Welchman Bombe, which he co-developed in 1936, was a cipher breaking machine. It allowed Allied forces to decode the messages of the Luftwaffe, or German air force. It was not until 1943 that the Colossus computer broke the Enigma code used by German U-boats. These inventions allowed the Allies to launch the D-Day offensive that eventually brought the Second World War to a close.

After the war, he was recruited by the National Physical Laboratory to come up with a response to the American developed EDVAC electronic computer. Turing’s past experiences led him to the modern concept of computers. He held to the notion that one computer should be capable of many tasks. Therefore, computer programming was the key to advancement, rather than adding more components. This new design was called the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE. After disagreements with his staff and superiors, however, Turing was taken off the project and a similar design was later completed using his principles.

He transferred to Manchester University from NPL and took up a new area of study: neurology and physiology. He became interested in the field of morphogenesis, which studies biological growth and form. For his discoveries, he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1951. He was arrested in 1952 for his homosexual tendencies, which he did not deny, but defended as his natural feelings. Rather than serve a prison term, he took injections of oestrogen to alter his sexuality.