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[[Image:Ture.jpg|right|thumb]]

[[Image:Ture.jpg|right|thumb]]

'''Alan Turing''' (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician who contributed to modern [[computer science]] and [[cryptography]].<ref>[http://www.turing.org.uk/bio The Biography of Alan Turing], ''turing.org''</ref> His contributions to the development of computer science and to the Allied victory in [[World War II]] have been exaggerated by those who are more interested in his [[homosexuality]] than in balanced history. The development of the computer in fact goes back to the nineteenth-century and the work of [[Ada Lovelace]] and [[Charles Babbage]].<ref>[http://books.google.de/books?id=r5kOgS1IB-8C&pg=PA35&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false Steven Homer, Alan L. Selman: ''Computability and Complexity Theory''], p. 35</ref>

'''Alan Turing''' (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician who is generally recognized as the father of computer science.<ref>[http://books.google.de/books?id=r5kOgS1IB-8C&pg=PA35&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false Steven Homer, Alan L. Selman: ''Computability and Complexity Theory''], p. 35</ref>  He also made contributions to [[cryptography]],<ref>[http://www.turing.org.uk/bio The Biography of Alan Turing], ''turing.org''</ref> and [[artificial intelligence]].

 

Inventing computer science is not the same as inventing the computer.  The invention of the computer&mdash;that is, a device that can automatically process data algorithmically, goes back to the the non-electronic "analytical engine" devised (but never actually built) by [[Charles Babbage]] and [[Ada Lovelace]].  Actual electronic computers were invented by John Atanasoff in the 1930s and J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in the 1940s, among others. Alan Turing was associated with one of the early engineering efforts in the 1940's to make practical computers, the "ACE" (Automatic Computing Engine) project at the UK's National Physical Laboratory, but it was bested by the EDSAC and EDVAC projects elsewhere in the UK.

 

Alan Turing's claim to fame came from the invention of the field of [[Computer science]].  He took the concepts of mathematical logic and recursive function theory, from such people and Alonzo Church and [[Kurt Gödel ]], and showed that a certain type of automatic computing device, called a [[Turing machine]], was deeply connected to those concepts. His major paper on the subject was the 1937 paper ''On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem'', in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.  The concepts of [[Undecidable|Decidability]], the [[Halting problem]], and the [[Turing machine]], all staples of college-level computer science, originated with him.

 

 

There is a prestigious annual "Turing Award", considered the computer science equivalent of the [[Nobel Prize]] named after him, and a separate annual invited "Turing Lecture" in the UK.  There are buildings named after him, and statues of him at Bletchley Park, where the wartime cryptography work was done, and in Manchester.

==Early life==

==Early life==

In the later part of WW2, because of the capture of the Enigma machine, the Nazis shifted from using the Enigma code to using a far more complicated one. They called it the Lorenz cipher and the Bletchley control nicknamed it Tunny, or the Fish. While the Enigma code machine had only three wheels, the Tunny machine had twelve, and had other random tricks built into it to make decoding so difficult that even a mathematician could hardly calculate all the possible combinations. The code changed with every letter of the same message. In the later part of the war, from 1943 onwards, Tunny, not Enigma, was the code that the Germans depended on for their top-most secrets and attack plans. Tutte and Flowers worked on breaking the Tunny code.

In the later part of WW2, because of the capture of the Enigma machine, the Nazis shifted from using the Enigma code to using a far more complicated one. They called it the Lorenz cipher and the Bletchley control nicknamed it Tunny, or the Fish. While the Enigma code machine had only three wheels, the Tunny machine had twelve, and had other random tricks built into it to make decoding so difficult that even a mathematician could hardly calculate all the possible combinations. The code changed with every letter of the same message. In the later part of the war, from 1943 onwards, Tunny, not Enigma, was the code that the Germans depended on for their top-most secrets and attack plans. Tutte and Flowers worked on breaking the Tunny code.

[[Bill Tutte]], the principal mathematician who undertook the work on Tunny, came from a humble background, being the son of a gardener and a cook, and he went to a grammar school - unlike Turing who had been to an elite private school. From there Tutte won a scholarship to university where he studied chemistry. He was aged only 24 when he arrived at Bletchley. His feats of deduction and analysis were extraordinary and have been described as a "miracle". Because the sheer quantity of data to be processed was overwhelming, Professor [[Max Newman]] suggested that they try to build a calculating machine along the lines suggested by Turing. Turing took no other part in the Tunny project. Turing's first machine did not work very well and the successful machine, "Colossus" was built by [[Tommy Flowers]]. He was a Post Office telephone engineer from a working-class background. He used electric circuits and valves. Because all this work was top secret, even after the war ended, neither of them could talk about what they had done or get credit for it. Unlike Turing, these "unsung heroes" have no statues put up to them, because they are [[heterosexual]].

[[Bill Tutte]], the principal mathematician who undertook the work on Tunny, came from a humble background, being the son of a gardener and a cook, and he went to a grammar school - unlike Turing who had been to an elite private school. From there Tutte won a scholarship to university where he studied chemistry. He was aged only 24 when he arrived at Bletchley. His feats of deduction and analysis were extraordinary and have been described as a "miracle". Because the sheer quantity of data to be processed was overwhelming, Professor [[Max Newman]] suggested that they try to build a calculating machine along the lines suggested by Turing. Turing took no other part in the Tunny project. Turing's first machine did not work very well and the successful machine, "Colossus" was built by [[Tommy Flowers]]. He was a Post Office telephone engineer from a working-class background. He used electric circuits and valves. Because all this work was top secret, even after the war ended, neither of them could talk about what they had done or get credit for it.<ref>http://www.computerweekly.com/video/Unsung-heroes-of-IT-The-story-of-Bill-Tutte-and-Tommy-Flowers

<ref>http://www.computerweekly.com/video/Unsung-heroes-of-IT-The-story-of-Bill-Tutte-and-Tommy-Flowers

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1393587/Professor-Bill-Tutte.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1393587/Professor-Bill-Tutte.html

http://www.stephenkettle.co.uk/turing.html</ref>

http://www.stephenkettle.co.uk/turing.html</ref>