Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science.
With the Turing test, Turing made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to debates regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He provided an influential formalisation of concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Church–Turing thesis: that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of capabilities of a Turing machine. During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German Naval cryptanalysis. He devised techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine which found settings for the Enigma machine.
After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating an early design for a stored-program computer, but never actually built. In 1947 he moved to the University of Manchester, to work mainly on software for the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest true computers.
In 1952, Turing was convicted of acts of gross indecency after he admitted a relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo hormone therapy. When Turing died in 1954, an inquest found that he had committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
