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Birth
Alan Turing was born on the 23rd of June, 1912 in Maida Vale, London, -
Sherbone School
At the age of 13, he went to Sherbone School, a respected independent school.He was an exceptionally gifted student! Turing showed remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems without having studied even elementary calculus. Aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but it is possible that he managed to deduce Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit. -
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King's College (University of Cambridge)
After Sherborne, Turing enrolled at King's College (University of Cambridge) in Cambridge, England, studying there from 1931 to 1934, where he achieved first-class honors in mathematics. As a result of his thesis, in which he proved the central limit theorem, Turing was elected a fellow at the school upon his graduation. In academics, a fellow is a member of a group of knowledgeable people who work together as peers in the pursuit of mutual knowledge or practice -
Turing Machine
Turing delivered a paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem, in which he presented the idea of a universal machine (later called the “Universal Turing Machine", and then the "Turing machine") capable of computing anything that is computable: The central concept of the modern computer was based on Turing’s paper. -
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Princton University and GCCS
Turing studied mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1938, he returned to Cambridge, and then took a part-time position with the Government Code and Cypher School, a British code-breaking organization. -
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World War 2
During World War II, Turing was a leading participant in wartime code-breaking, particularly that of German ciphers. He worked at Bletchley Park where he made five major advances in the field of cryptanalysis, including specifying the bombe, an electromechanical device used to help decipher German encrypted signals. Turing’s contributions to the code-breaking process didn’t stop there, he also wrote two papers about mathematical approaches to code-breaking. -
Moving Back to London
Turing began working for the National Physical Laboratory. Among his most notable contributions while working at the facility, Turing led the design work for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) and ultimately created a groundbreaking blueprint for store-program computers. Though a complete version of the ACE was never built, its concept has been used as a model by tech corporations worldwide for several years, influencing the design of the first personal computers. -
University of Manchester
Turing went on to hold high-ranking positions in the mathematics department and later the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester. -
Turing Test
He first addressed the issue of artificial intelligence in his 1950 paper, "Computing machinery and intelligence," and proposed an experiment known as the “Turing Test”—an effort to create an intelligence design standard for the tech industry. Over the past several decades, the test has significantly influenced debates over artificial intelligence. -
Death
Turing's house maid found him dead in Wilmslow, Cheshire. The remains of an apple were found next to his body. The autopsy reported that was no apple slices in his stomach, but four ounces of fluid which smelled strongly of bitter almonds, as does a solution of cyanide was found in his stomach. Trace smell of bitter almonds was also reported in vital organs. The autopsy concluded that the cause of death was asphyxia due to cyanide poisoning and ruled a suicide. He was only 41.
