Alan Turing

Also known as Alan M. Turing, Alan Mathieson Turing, Turing, Alan Mathison Turing

English computer scientist (1912–1954)

OverviewAI-generated

Alan Turing (1912–1954) was a mathematician and author. He is described in various online archives and exhibitions. His works include *Digital Cipher* and *Alan Turings Code Games for Kids*. He has five recorded works in academic databases and two listed in library catalogs.

Turing died in 1954 and was buried on June 12 of that year. He is recognized in the Royal Society collection. His name appears in 1,603 other encyclopedia articles. He is associated with the official website turingarchive.org.

Quotes attributed to him include statements on machines and science. A music profile under his name lists tags such as screamo and emoviolence, with similar artists including .22LR and Ostraca. This profile shows 223 listeners and a playcount of 776.

Synthesized by Vinony from 20 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Wikiquote, Open Library, Crossref, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works: 2

Top works

Digital CipherCopy Presents DIGITIZED WRITING SOLUTIONS
Alan Turings Code Games for Kids

via Open Library + Wikidata

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 223
Total plays: 777

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

MEGA6: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 6.0
· 2013 · cited 34,826x
The ERA5 global reanalysis
· 2020 · cited 24,157x
Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
· 2019 · cited 20,854x
Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
· 2001 · cited 18,613x
DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs
· 2018 · cited 18,243x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.”
“Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.”
“A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.”
“There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily.”
“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms.”
“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Alan Mathison Turing (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, 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.

Born in London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated from King's College, Cambridge, and in 1938, earned a doctorate degree from Princeton University. During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. He led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Turing devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. He played a crucial role in cracking intercepted messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in the Battle of the Atlantic and other engagements.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Alan Turing” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.