Alan Turing

Profile - Alan Turing (1912–1954)

Born in London and educated at Cambridge, Alan Turing was an extraordinarily brilliant mathematician. He helped both computer science and artificial intelligence come into being as disciplines, partly because of his famous work on computable numbers, which led to the idea of the Universal Turing Machine. He also created the Turing Test, which pits a machine against a person as a way of finding out whether the machine can think. Thirty years after the Second World War, Turing was revealed as the master code-breaker who had broken the famous Enigma cipher. He also created the first functioning programmed computer, the Colossus, to read the highest-level German secret codes. He was homosexual, and was eventually arrested and tried for what was then illegal behaviour, and forced to take female hormones. He died in June 1954 of cyanide poisoning, probably by suicide. He was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013.