Alan Turing Biography - English Mathematician and Computer Scientist.

Alan Turing Biography - English Mathematician and Computer Scientist.

Alan Mathison Turing, (Paddington, London; June 23, 1912-Wilmslow, Cheshire; June 7, 1954), was a British mathematician, logician, computer theoretician, cryptographer, philosopher, theoretical biologist, marathoner and ultra-distance runner.

He is considered one of the fathers of computer science and a forerunner of modern computing. He provided an influential formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation: the Turing machine. He formulated his own version of it that today is widely accepted as the Church-Turing (1936) thesis.

During World War II, he worked to crack Nazi codes, particularly those of the Enigma machine, and for a time was the director of the Naval Enigma section of Bletchley Park. It has been estimated that his work shortened the duration of that war by between two and four years. After the war, he designed one of the first digital programmable electronic computers at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK and shortly afterwards he built another of the first machines at the University of Manchester.

In the field of artificial intelligence, he is known above all for the conception of the Turing test (1950), a criterion according to which the intelligence of a machine can be judged if its answers in the test are indistinguishable from those of a being. human.

Turing's career came to an abrupt end after he was tried for homosexuality in 1952. Two years after his conviction, he died - according to the official version, by suicide; however, his death has given rise to other hypotheses, including the murder. On December 24, 2013, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom issued the edict by which the mathematician was officially exonerated, annulling all charges against him.

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