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Alan Turing - Wikipedia

Alan Turing

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Alan Mathison Turing (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist.1 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.234 Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.5

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.67

After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948, Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, where he contributed to the development of early Manchester computers8 and became interested in mathematical biology. Turing wrote on the chemical basis of morphogenesis9[^2] and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, he was never fully recognised during his lifetime because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.10

In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment, a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, but the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.11 Following a campaign in 2009, British prime minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology for “the appalling way[Turing] was treated”. Queen Elizabeth II granted a pardon in 2013. The term “Alan Turing law” is used informally to refer to a 2017 law in the UK that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.12

Turing left an extensive legacy in mathematics and computing which has become widely recognised with statues and many things named after him, including an annual award for computing innovation. His portrait appears on the Bank of England £50 note, first released on 23 June 2021 to coincide with his birthday. The audience vote in a 2019 BBC series named Turing the greatest scientist of the 20th century.13

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter writes:

Atheist, homosexual, eccentric, marathon-running mathematician, A. M. Turing was in large part responsible not only for the concept of computers, incisive theorems about their powers, and a clear vision of the possibility of computer minds, but also for the cracking of German ciphers during the Second World War. It is fair to say we owe much to Alan Turing for the fact that we are not under Nazi rule today.”14

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. “Alan Turing”. The British Library. Archived from the original on 23 July 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2019. ↩

  2. Newman, M.H.A. (1955). “Alan Mathison Turing. 1912–1954”. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 1: 253–263. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1955.0019. ISSN 0080-4606. JSTOR 769256. S2CID 711366. ↩

  3. Gray, Paul (29 March 1999). “Computer Scientist: Alan Turing”. Time. Archived from the original on 19 January 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2011. Providing a blueprint for the electronic digital computer. The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine. ↩

  4. Sipser 2006, p. 137 ↩

  5. Beavers 2013, p. 481 ↩

  6. Copeland, Jack (18 June 2012). “Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved ‘millions of lives’”. BBC News Technology. Archived from the original on 11 October 2014. Retrieved 26 October 2014. ↩

  7. A number of sources state that Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Whilst it may be a defensible claim, both the Churchill Centre and Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges have stated they know of no documentary evidence to support it, nor the date or context in which Churchill supposedly made it, and the Churchill Centre lists it among their Churchill ‘Myths’, see Schilling, Jonathan (8 January 2015). “Myths > Churchill Said Turing Made the Single Biggest Contribution to Allied Victory”. International Churchill Society. The Churchill Centre. Archived from the original on 17 February 2015. Retrieved 9 January 2015. and Hodges, Andrew. “Part 4: The Relay Race”. Update to Alan Turing: The Enigma. Archived from the original on 20 January 2015. Retrieved 9 January 2015. A BBC News profile piece that repeated the Churchill claim has subsequently been amended to say there is no evidence for it. See Spencer, Clare (11 September 2009). “Profile: Alan Turing”. BBC News. Archived from the original on 13 December 2017. Retrieved 17 February 2015. Update 13 February 2015 Official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years but added the caveat that this did not account for the use of the atomic bomb and other eventualities. Hinsley, Harry (1996) [1993]. The Influence of ULTRA in the Second World War. Keith Lockstone’s home page. Archived from the original on 15 October 2022. Retrieved 26 August 2024. Transcript of a lecture given on Tuesday 19 October 1993 at Cambridge University ↩

  8. Leavitt 2007, pp. 231–233 ↩

  9. Milinkovitch, Michel C.; Jahanbakhsh, Ebrahim; Zakany, Szabolcs (16 October 2023). “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Reaction Diffusion in Vertebrate Skin Color Patterning”. Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. 39 (1): 145–174. doi:10.1146/annurev-cellbio-120319-024414. ISSN 1081-0706. PMID 37843926. ↩

  10. Olinick, Michael (2021). “Chapter 15”. Simply Turing. United States: Simply Charly. ↩

  11. Pease, Roland (23 June 2012). “Alan Turing: Inquest’s suicide verdict ‘not supportable’”. BBC News. Archived from the original on 23 June 2012. Retrieved 23 June 2012. We have… been recreating the narrative of Turing’s life, and we have recreated him as an unhappy young man who committed suicide. But the evidence is not there. ↩

  12. “‘Alan Turing law’: Thousands of gay men to be pardoned”. BBC News. 20 October 2016. Archived from the original on 20 October 2016. Retrieved 20 October 2016. ↩

  13. “Alan Turing is voted the nation’s icon of the 20th century in BBC Two’s Icons finale”. www.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 12 May 2026. ↩

  14. Hodges 1983, p. xiii. ↩

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