Mr. Alan Turing

Some of you may or may not know who Alan Turing is but he is important all the same. Being a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, Turing used this knowledge to develop the Turing machine, which is assumed to be the model of general purpose computers. He is considered as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence and set the premise for the future of a computers. He recently came up in the news, after the House of Commons opted for a posthumous pardon which was signed on December 24, 2013; 59 years later after his death.

Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London, England. From the day he enrolled at St. Michael's, his headmistress and parents knew that he was incredibly intelligent. He enjoyed more of the mathematics and science, which upset his teachers as they wanted him to put his emphasis more on the classics. Turing headed off to King's College to continue his education and he had a great impact on the school; becoming a "fellow" at the college. His great career all started when he started making Turing machines to reformulate Kurt Godel's limits of proof. The machine can be used to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a computer.

After the Turing machine, Alan Turing's career skyrocketed because of World War II. He worked at Bletchley Park where he helped to break German ciphers throughout the war and eventually had to created the Turing-Welchman bombe. A bombe was a electromechanical machine that made it easier to break Enigma and was enhanced by Gordon Welchman. The only problem with the bombe was that there was too much code to break and not enough bombe around to break the code. His group wrote to Churchill and soon enough over 200 bombe were in operation at the end of the war.

After the war, Turing went to work on the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine). He had to go through various obstacles that included where to build the ACE because Bletchley Park was not secret enough after the war for Turing to build such a secretive project. But in 1948, Turing worked with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne to began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. The program faced off against Turing's colleague and lost but the program trumped the old program known as TurboChamp. The "Turing Test" was a huge contribution in the artificial intelligent department and still is used even though it's been around for over half a century.

However, the main reason why Alan Turing was recently brought up in the news was because of what happened in his personal life. Turing had an affair with another man, Arnold Murray, which was illegal in the United Kingdom at that time. The relationship could have been kept a secret if Turing hadn't gone to the police after a burglar robbed his house. After going on trial and being convicted, he chose to go on hormonal treatment instead of going to jail and stayed on that treatment for about 2 years. On June 8, 1954, Turing was found dead by apparent suicide caused by cyanide poisoning. While he died almost 59 years ago, the House of Commons in England opted for posthumous pardon which got put into play December 24, 2013. But before that, Prime Minister Gordon Brown posthumously apologized for the prosecution of Alan Turing for just being a homosexual. This was a big deal because homosexuality is still a big controversy today; 59 years later than that tragic event.