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Birth
Alan Turing was born in a nursing home in London, England. -
Albert Einstein
At the age of 16, Turing got to grips with Albert Einstein's work and extrapolated Einstein's questioning of Newton's Laws of Motion from a text in which this was never made explicit. -
Death of Friend
Christopher Morcom, Alans good friend from Sherborne School, passed away. -
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University of Cambridge
During this time Alan was studying mathematics. -
Central Limit Theorem
Turing proves the central limit theorem in his dissertation and is made a fellow at King's at the age of just 22. -
Universal Turing Machine
In 1936, Turing delivered a paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," in which he presented the notion of a universal machine (later called the “Universal Turing Machine -
Princeton
Alan goes to Princeton University in America to study mathematics and is awarded a PhD. -
War With Germany
Turing went on to join the Government Code and Cypher School, and, at the outbreak of war with Germany he moved to the organization’s wartime headquarters at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. -
His Creation
Turing also devised the first systematic method for breaking messages encrypted by the sophisticated German cipher machine that the British called “Tunny.” At the end of the war, Turing was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his code-breaking work. -
After War
Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to create an electronic computer. -
Manchester University
On his 1945 appointment to the chair of pure mathematics at Manchester University, he had negotiated a large Royal Society grant for the construction of a computer. -
Work
In late 1947 he returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year during which he produced a seminal work on Intelligent Machinery that was not published in his lifetime. -
Coding
In 1947 his Abbreviated Code Instructions marked the beginning of programming languages. -
Deputy Director
In May 1948, Newman offered Turing the post as Deputy Director of the computing laboratory at Manchester University. -
Chess
In 1948 Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. -
The Turing Test
The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. -
Award
He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in July 1951, for the work done fifteen years before. -
Arrested
Alan Turing was arrested and came to trial on 31 March 1952, after the police learned of his sexual relationship with a young Manchester man. This ultimately led to the end of his successful career. -
Death
He was found by his cleaner when she came in on 8 June 1954. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple beside his bed. The coroner's verdict was suicide. -
Statue
A bronze statue of Turing was unveiled at the University of Surrey on October 28, 2004, to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. -
Imitation Game
A movie is released based on the life of Alan Turing.
