When polls were conducted in the media at the millennium to discover who folk thought were the most influential people of the previous century, I don’t recall Alan Turing’s name being mentioned.
Yet arguably, if he had been better celebrated, he might well have been No 1.
What an extraordinary and sad life he led. He was born in London on 23 June 1902 – so the hundredth anniversary of his birth falls on Saturday.
These are some of his achievements:
Before the Second World War he invented the Turing machine as a tool for studying the computability of mathematical functions. Turing's hypothesis holds that a function is computable only if it can be computed by a Turing machine. This implies that Turing machines can solve any problem that a modern computer program can solve.
During the war he worked at Bletchley Park, leading the team that broke German codes, including the settings for the Enigma machine.
At the National Physical Laboratory after the war he created early designs for a stored-program computer.
Many think of him as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
Throughout his life he most likely suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, although this was never diagnosed. He was arrested and charged with gross indecency in 1952 (when homosexual acts were still illegal). Given the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration, he chose the latter.
He died from cyanide poisoning two years later, the inquest deciding that he had committed suicide.
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