Alan Turing was not a well known figure during his lifetime.
But today he is famous for being an eccentric yet passionate British mathematician, who conceived modern computing and played a crucial part in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in WW2.
He was also a victim of mid-20th Century attitudes to homosexuality – he was chemically castrated before dying at the age of 41.
1926: Discouraged at school
Alan Turing spent much of his early life separated from his parents, as his father worked in the British administration of India.
At 13 years old, he was sent to Sherborne School, a large boarding school in Dorset. The rigid education system gave his free-ranging scientific mind little encouragement, so Turing studied advanced modern scientific ideas, such as relativity, on his own, running far ahead of the school syllabus.
1930: Devastated but inspired by his friend’s death
The situation changed when Alan Turing became intensely attracted to another able pupil, Christopher Morcom.
He was inspired to communicate more and also to become an academic success. But Christopher died suddenly from tuberculosis. Devastated, Turing wanted to believe that Christopher’s mind somehow lived on. His emotional turmoil involved a scientific fascination with the problem of mind and brain that underlay his later work.
1935: A new home in Cambridge
Turing won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, and took the Mathematics degree with distinction.
He thrived in a culture that encouraged his scientific interests and as a young gay man he also found protection in the liberal ambiance the college provided. At just 22, he was elected to a Fellowship. Turing was already on track for a distinguished career in pure mathematics. Yet his unusual interest in finding practical uses for abstract mathematical ideas was to push him in an altogether different direction.
King’s College, University of Cambridge
Turing’s work in probability theory won him a Fellowship of King’s College, University of Cambridge, in 1935.
1936: Founder of modern computing
In 1936, Turing published a paper that is now recognised as the foundation of computer science.
Turing analysed what it meant for a human to follow a definite method or procedure to perform a task. For this purpose, he invented the idea of a ‘Universal Machine’ that could decode and perform any set of instructions. Ten years later he would turn this revolutionary idea into a practical plan for an electronic computer, capable of running any program.
1939: Breaking the Enigma code
After two years at Princeton, developing ideas about secret ciphers, Turing returned to Britain and joined the government’s code-breaking department.
In July 1939, the Polish Cipher Bureau passed on crucial information about the Enigma machine, which was used by the Germans to encipher all its military and naval signals. After September 1939, joined by other mathematicians at Bletchley Park, Turing rapidly developed a new machine (the ‘Bombe’) capable of breaking Enigma messages on an industrial scale.
1941: End of a brief engagement
In 1941, Turing’s section, ‘Hut 8’, mastered the German submarine communication system that was vital to the battle of the Atlantic.
In the course of this exciting work he found the friendship of another mathematician, Joan Clarke. Turing proposed to her, but immediately told her of his ‘homosexual tendencies’, and the engagement soon ended. After this, he became more confident in developing his homosexual life. Meanwhile, the war took a new turn as America joined the war.
1944: The electronic connection
Turing worked on other technical innovations during the war – in particular, a system to encrypt and decrypt spoken telephone conversations.
Codenamed Delilah, it was successfully demonstrated using a recording of one of Winston Churchill’s speeches, but was never used in action. However, it gave Turing hands-on experience of working with electronics, and led to a position at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), where he worked on what he sometimes described as an ‘electronic brain’.
1946: Designs a first electronic computer
In March 1946 Turing produced a detailed design for what was called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE.)
This was a digital computer in the modern sense, storing programs in its memory. His report emphasised the unlimited range of applications opened up by this technological revolution, and software developments ahead of parallel American developments. Yet his relationship with NPL soured and he left in 1948, before a pilot version of the ACE was made in 1950.
1950: Can a machine think?
Turing moved to the University of Manchester, where electronic engineers had already demonstrated a very small stored-program computer.
Now he focused on the use of computers. His main theme had been in investigating the power of a computer to rival human thought. In 1950, he published a philosophical paper including the idea of an ‘imitation game’ for comparing human and machine outputs, now called the Turing Test. This paper remains his best known work and was a key contribution to the field of Artificial Intelligence.
What is data encryption
Data Encryption is a method of preserving data confidentiality by transforming it into ciphertext, which can only be decoded using a unique decryption key produced at the time of the encryption or prior to it. Data encryption converts data into a different form (code) that can only be accessed by people who have a secret key (formally known as a decryption key) or password. Data that has not been encrypted is referred to as plaintext, and data that has been encrypted is referred to as ciphertext. Encryption is one of the most widely used and successful data protection technologies in today’s corporate world. Encryption is a critical tool for maintaining data integrity, and its importance cannot be overstated. Almost everything on the internet has been encrypted at some point.