Alan Turing: A Comprehensive Biography

Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence . Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton UUniversity.

Encyclopedia Podcast

This video uses material from the Wikipedia article ALAN TURING (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing) which is released under the license Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported - CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)