Preview

The Role of Alan Turing in the History of Computing

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1157 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Role of Alan Turing in the History of Computing
The role of Alan Turing in the history of computing

Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June 1912, Paddington, London. He was a true pioneer in computer science and if it were not for this man, no one would probably be typing an essay based on him on a modern computer. He is renowned for his passion of mathematics and the invention of the Turing machine/test, breaking the German enigma code during World War One, and for making the first automated computing machine (the ACE).

At an early age he was sent to preparatory school by his parents, he attended these until enrolling at Sherbourne in 1926. His teachers there were surprised to find him working through the long way for the answers to questions, after Sherbourne Turing enrolled at King’s College where he became a mathematics scholar in 1931 where he began his studies in maths and logistics. He was elected at King’s and won the Smith’s award in 1936 for a paper he wrote on the “Gaussian error function”, this is when he began work to develop The Turing Machine.(Copeland, 2004) But later in 1936 he moved to the United States to study at Princeton for two years where he studied the theory of computation and in 1937 presented a paper called “On computable numbers, with an application to the “Entscheidungs problem” and soon to challenge David Hilbert’s three questions put forward to the best of the mathematical minds, which were; Was maths complete? Was maths constant?, was maths decidable? (Hodges, 1992; Copeland 2004).

Though his work on the Entscheidungs problem he began working on to define what a method was, and through that he came up with the Turing machine theory which can be said to be a mechanical process that was able to perform all the operations a person working with a logical system would be able to perform this theory compares human thought processes to that of a machine, which in the Turing machine theory are categorized as terms of inputs, outputs and machine states. The Turing machine is a



Bibliography: Schmidl, H., (1998) On Enigma and a Method for its Decryption http://www.cs.miami.edu/~harald/enigma/index.html Kozaczuk, W., (1984), Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two, (2nd ed.), Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America. Hodges, A., (1992), Alan Turing: the enigma, London: Burnett Books. P.26-34. Copeland, B. J., (2004) The Essential Turing. Oxford: Oxford University Press Pease, R., Alan Turing: Inquest 's suicide verdict 'not supportable ' (June 26,2012)., BBC News, science and environment. Copeland, B.J., Alan Turing.net, the Turing archive for the history of computing (2012).

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    This incident has been recorded in many historical documents such as the works, biographer Plutarch and, historian Thucydides. From analysis of these their accounts is can be deduced that Plutarch’s account is unreliable and presents a biased point of view.…

    • 529 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This feat was accomplished in a wide variety of ways. One of the ways information about the enemy was obtained was through Alan Turing’s Turing Machine. The Turing Machine was a complex piece of technology that decoded private Nazi messages. The decoding of the messages gave the Allied power the knowledge of the enemy’s planned attack locations and other invaluable information. This meant that the Allies were able to prevent attacks, prepare much more thoroughly, and save millions of lives. Alan Turing, the individual who solved the Nazi’s enigma machine through his own complex machine, was a computer genius. He and some other computer pioneers worked tirelessly to crack the enigma code. Winston Churchill even recognized Alan Turing as “the single biggest contributor to the Allied victory in World War II.…

    • 1346 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The three main colonial empires in the New World were the British, French, and Spanish empires. They had various differences in societal, economic, political, and religious outlooks. They also left behind some legacies, which even today seem to resonate.…

    • 468 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Psychology unit 3 chapter 1

    • 4397 Words
    • 18 Pages

    . René Descartes was well known for his views on consciousness and works in the field of science and mathematics for his work on geometry and algebra. Descartes was born in 1596 in the town of la Haye in the south of France.…

    • 4397 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    to make sense of our world, and that the ability to think mathematically was an…

    • 2381 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    References: * Leavitt, David (2007). The Man Who Knew Too Much; Alan Turing and the invention of the computer..…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alan Turing Bombing

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Dr. Turing was a mathematician and logician. During his lifetime, he was an innovator in the fields of cryptanalysis, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. The legacy of his work continued in the areas of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI)–a term not invented until a few years after his death. Unfortunately, he was not recognized for his accomplishments and inventions until after well after his death.…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, cryptographer and a pioneer of computer science. It has been…

    • 1300 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    <br>"Thus in arithmetic, during the few months that he studied it, he made such progress that he frequently confounded his master by continually raising doubts and difficulties. He devoted some time to music … Yet though he studied so many different things, he never neglected design and working in relief, those being the things which appealed to his fancy more than any other."…

    • 2601 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    What did Alan Turing do after he broke the Enigma? I mean a brilliant man like that must have had many job offers after people found out about Enigma. But here is the thing, people weren't told about the Enigma machine. The government wanted the machine to be a secret, so that is there was a mole they couldn’t leak the information. Once the war was over, anyone who knew about the machine was told to forget about it, or they would be killed. Alan’s work was never published so others could see. When the war ended he was sent home, to go back to his normal life. Never able to tell people of his great…

    • 896 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    It seems he was destined for great things with his great grandfather having been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather having been a vice president of a national bank and his father having been a prominent lawyer (Mirick, 1996). He displayed ambition, intelligence and a competitive spirit at a very young age and excelled by surpassing all his peers in all subjects, especially math and science. But it was his curiosity, drive and vision for success that provided the passion and obsession that would lead his creative and critical thinking to the success and contributions that we all benefit from today in the world of computer operating systems and other software.…

    • 1291 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ada Lovelace (Thesis)

    • 296 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Ada Lovelace was born in 1815, and died in 1852 from cancer. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of a famous poet Lord Byron and Anabella Millbank, who also enjoyed math. Ada’s parents were divorced right after she was born and was never able to meet her estrange father. However, her father corresponded with her mother on her upbringing. Anabella Millbank, Ada’s mother, did not want her daughter to be a poet like her father and did everything possible, pushed Ada night and day, to learn mathematics. Even though Ada’s fond interests were elsewhere, her mother diminished those interests until Ada grew a fondness of math, by no choice of her own. At an early age Ada met with Charles Babbage in London, and with that Ada first learned of the Difference Engine. This is when Ada Lovelace’s eyes grew with enormous content, interest, and enthusiasm of the invention, which was later known as the Analytical Engine. In her twenties, Ada married her husband (several years her age) Earl William King and soon after, she bore three children. After having her children she became engrossed and focused on the formulation of the Analytical Engine, which took several years of extensive work, which she loved. Ada composed a “plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now regarded as the first “computer program” (Larry Riddle, p. 1). Ada became ill and was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus and died at an early age, like her father, right after her accomplishments. Ada’s achievement was shown in her “notes” on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was finally acknowledged and “became reality in the 20th century computers which earned her a place in the history of mathematics and computer science” (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, p.…

    • 296 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alan Turing: A Hero

    • 443 Words
    • 2 Pages

    No hero was ever born a hero. Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London, England. At an early age, he showed signs of particularly high intelligence. When Turing was thirteen, he attended the well known Sherborne School. There he became interested in math and science. After Sherborne, Turning attended King’s college in Cambridge, England. He also earned his Phd at Princeton University in New Jersey.…

    • 443 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    David Hilbert

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages

    His calculus examination led him to invent “Hilbert space,” considered to be among the primary concepts of functional analysis as well as modern mathematical physics. He founded fields such as modern logic and met mathematics.…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Can you imagine a machine so important that without it, democracy wouldn't exist. A machine that has undoubtedly changed the face of the Earth and the modern world whether we know it or not. If it wasn't for this device, generations ahead of its time, we would still be under the rule of Hitler in an imperialist dictatorship. This device is none other than the Turing Machine. It is a machine that was created in 1912 and named after its creator Alan Turing. The machine was a result of the Allies need to be able to decode the encrypted messages of the Natzi. It would take days just to decode one line of encrypted Natzi messages, which could have had viable information as to where they might be planning or even worse where they were going to attack. The Enigma machine which was very inefficient. The Turing Machine was able to take this code and decrypt it in a time much faster than the Enigma Machine used at the time.…

    • 709 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays