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Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist.He 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.

During the Second World War, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's code-breaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section which was responsible for German naval crypt-analysis. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to an electro-mechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, and in so doing helped win the war. It has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million lives.

After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when by the Labouchere Amendment, "gross indecency" was still criminal in the UK. Turing died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated." Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.

Born on the 23rd June 1912 in London, United Kingdom
Died on the 7th June 1954 in Wilmslow, Cheshire, United Kingdom

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