FREE ESSAY ON ALAN TURING

ALAN TURING

Alan Turing was born in London on 23 June 1912. He was the son of Julius
Mathius Turing and Ethel Sara Stoney, the youngest of three children, he was
born to a distinguished family. His family background includes diplomats and
engineers, three of which succeeded to the Royal Society.
Alan turing was educated at Sherbourne school, from 1923 to 1931. After
which he studied mathematics at Kings College, Cambridge, graduating in
1935 with a B.A. He was elected a fellow of the college on the strength
of his paper On the Gaussian error function, it won a Smiths prize for
mathematics in 1936. Turing was brilliant and slightly headstrong, he
discovered the central limit theorem for himself, after it had been already
discovered and proved. Later in 1936 he went to the United States of
America to study at Princeton University for two years with Alonso
Church. Turing worked on the theory of computation and in 1937, he
presented the paper for which he was to become famous, to the London
Mathematical Society. The paper On computable numbers with an
pplication to the Entscheidungsproblem, proved that a class of
mathematical problems existed which could not be solved by automatic
machines and introduced the concept of a theoretical universal
computing machine (the Turing machine). Turing was awarded a Ph.D. degree
for this paper by Princeton University.
Alan Turing returned to Kings College in 1938 and when war broke out in
1939, he began work for the government code and cipher school at
Bletchley Park. In 1946 Turing was awarded an O.B.E. for designing
machines to break the German Enigma codes. After the war Turing declined
ffer of a lectureship at Cambridge, to join the mathematics division of the
National Physics Laboratory at Teddington, where he began to design the
general computer called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). In 1948
Turing was appointed reader in the theory of computation at the University of
Manchester and made assistant director of Manchester Automatic Digital Machine
(MADAM).
Two years later Turing published a paper in Mind entitled computing
machinery and intelligence. In the paper Turing concluded that by his
definition of thinking, it was possible to make intelligent machines. 
uring's last years were spent working at home. In 1952 he published
the Chemical basis of morphogenesis, it applied mathematical and
mechanical theory to biology. Alan Turing died from self administered
poisoning on 7 June 1954. Alan Turing's place in history was earned by
his theory of computation which he worked out in 1936 and 1937.