In her 1959 biography of her son, Sarah Turing devoted just a short chapter to the war, noting: After World War II, Turing then turned to the foundations of computer science, including his famous popular paper on whether a machine can think, which introduced the “Turing test,” the original imitation game.īut for the period of the war itself, almost nothing was known of Turing’s activities.

In order to do this Turing introduced the concept of what is now termed a “Turing machine,” a mathematical abstraction of an algorithm. In the years immediately prior to World War II, Turing had solved Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, that is, the “decision problem,” whether there exists a mechanical procedure for determining if a mathematical statement expressed in a formal language has a proof. In 1970, Alan Turing was best known for his work in two areas: mathematical logic and computer science. Both a compelling narrative and a work of scholarship, Alan Turing: The Enigma is the definitive biography of one of the greatest minds of the modern world.The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game. 'As vivid a picture as one could hope for a most complex and intriguing man,' says Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. His suicide in 1954 remains one of the many enigmas in an astonishing life story. In 1952, he revealed his homosexuality and was forced to participate in a humiliating treatment program, and was ever after regarded as a security risk. Drawn into the cockpit of world events and the forefront of technological innovation, Alan Turing was also an innocent and unpretentious gay man trying to live in a society that criminalized him. But Turing s true goal was the scientific understanding of the mind, brought out in the drama and wit of the famous 'Turing test' for machine intelligence, and his prophecy for the twenty-first century.

In 1945 he was a pioneer of electronic computer design. Already in the 1930s he had defined the concept of the universal machine, which underpins the computer revolution. But Turing s vision went far beyond the desperate wartime struggle. Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) was a British mathematician who made history: His breaking of theGerman U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic.

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