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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nWith the German war effort now surging ahead, it became necessary for British Intelligence to find a new method of decoding intercepted German transmissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fortunately for the British Government, in September of 1938, a man named Alan Turing, one of the foremost mathematician-cryptanalysts in the world, had begun working at Bletchley Park, a mansion in the English countryside in Buckinghamshire, that became the principal center of Allied code-breaking during WWII, with the GC&CS (Government Code and Cypher School), and subsequently tasked with building a more efficient German-code-breaking machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reaffirming himself as one of the most brilliant cryptanalysts in the world, Turing and his small group of colleagues successfully redesigned the \u201cBomba\u201d by March 18, 1940, and had the first infallible decoding device in operation by late 1941.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Turing\u2019s wartime efforts for Great Britain didn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Early Life<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in Maida Vale, London, England, to Julius Mathison Turing, an officer with the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj government at Chatrapur, India, and Ethel Stoney-Sara, daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, chief engineer of Madras Railways in southern India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Julius and Ethel were married on October 1, 1907, at St. Bartholomew\u2019s Church in Ballsbridge, Dublin, Ireland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turing had one brother, John Ferrier, who was one year his senior. He was the father of noted author Sir John Dermot Turing, 12th Baronet of the Turing Baronetcy, in the County of Aberdeen, Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turing\u2019s father was still active in the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj government during Turing\u2019s childhood, so he and his wife traveled between Hastings and India; Turning and his brother staying with a retired Army couple while in India; at Baston Lodge, Upper Maze Hill, St. Leonards-on-Sea, while at Hastings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1927, his parents purchased a house in Guildford, Surrey, UK, where Turing lived during holidays from school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Education<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Even as a child, Turing showed signs of the genius he would display throughout his life. The headmistress of St Michael\u2019s<\/em>, the primary school in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, England, where Turing attended from age six to nine, said of him, \u201cI have had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between January 1922 and 1926, Turing was educated at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, an independent school in the village of Frant (now East Sussex), after which the 13-year-old went to Sherborne School<\/em>, an independent boarding school in the market town of Sherborne, Dorset, where he boarded at Westcott House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing\u2019s first day at Sherborne School coincided with the 1926 General Strike<\/em> in Britain, a strike involving railwaymen, transport workers, printers, dock workers, ironworkers, and steelworkers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing was so determined to be present on his first day at the new school that he rode his bicycle, the only transportation available, 60 miles from Southampton to Sherborne, staying overnight at an inn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even as a student at Hazelhurst Preparatory, <\/em>Turing\u2019s natural aptitude for mathematics and science was apparent, which gained him no favor from his teachers at Sherborne<\/em>, who believed a proper education is grounded in the classics<\/em>: Greek and Roman literature, language, and philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing\u2019s headmaster wrote to his parents, \u201cI hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Driven by his own independent scholarship, by the age of 15, Turing was able to solve advanced problems in calculus, having never formally studied calculus, and by 16, could grasp Newton\u2019s and Einstein\u2019s theories\u2014even Einstein\u2019s challenge of \u201cNewton\u2019s Laws of Motion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Uncooperative and essentially unteachable, Turing was more focused on his own methods of solving mathematical problems than considering those taught by his teachers. Despite producing unconventional answers by his unorthodox methods, Turing won almost every mathematics prize Sherborne <\/em>offered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Upon graduating from Sherborne in 1931, Turing was offered an \u00a380 per annum scholarship (approximately $5,500 in 2024 US dollars) to study at King\u2019s College, in Cambridge, England, where, after three years, he graduated with First-Class Honors in Mathematics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the spring of 1935, Turing began his Master\u2019s course\u2014completing it in just two years. Shortly after, he published his first scientific paper, a one-page article titled \u201cEquivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity,\u201d which was featured in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the spring of 1937, Turing found himself unintentionally in competition with a 32-year-old American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, and Princeton University professor named Alonzo Church, who, like Turing, had been actively challenging long-accepted mathematical theories and had accepted the mathematical challenge known as the Entscheidungsproblem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Posed by mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann in 1928, the Entscheidungsproblem relates to the field of \u201cdecidability of problems,\u201d and asks for an algorithm (a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions) that considers, as input, a statement and answers \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d according to whether the statement is \u201cuniversally valid\u201d (i.e., valid in every case).<\/p>\n\n\n\n By May of 1937, Turing had completed and presented for publication a 36-page paper titled \u201cOn Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,\u201d which was published in two parts in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In it, Turing presents what would henceforth be known as \u201cTuring machines,\u201d universal computing machines capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation that can be represented as an algorithm. Turing then went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem.<\/em> This paper has been deemed \u201ceasily the most influential math paper in history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just before the publication of Turing\u2019s paper, Professor Church published a paper of his own, wherein he presents his own system called \u201cLambda calculus,\u201d a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any \u201cTuring machine\u201d (and vice-versa). According to what became known as the \u201cChurch\u2013Turing\u201d thesis, \u201cTuring machines\u201d and \u201cLambda calculus\u201d are both capable of computing anything that is computable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note: Although both Turing and Church devised models of computation that can essentially substitute for one another, the majority of mathematicians around the world favor Turing\u2019s as easier to use.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n From September 1936 to July 1938, Turing pursued his PhD at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, under the guidance of Professor Alonzo Church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to his strictly mathematical studies, Turing also began a study of cryptology<\/em>, subsequently building three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier, an electronic circuit used in digital electronics (such as a computer) to multiply two binary numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In June of 1938, Turing achieved his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton; his dissertation, \u201cSystems of Logic Based on Ordinals,\u201d which introduced the concept of \u201cordinal logic\u201d and the idea of \u201crelative computing,\u201d in which \u201cTuring machines\u201d are augmented with so-called \u201coracles\u201d which allow the study of problems beyond those solvable by \u201cTuring machines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A short time later, Turing returned to the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By September 1938, Turing had been enlisted to join the British codebreaking organization GC&CS<\/em> (Government Code and Cypher School), led by chief cryptographer, classics scholar, and papyrologist (interpreter of ancient documents), Dilly Knox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing and Knox concentrated on cryptanalysis of the so-called \u201cEnigma\u201d cipher machine used by Nazi Germany’s intelligence, using information provided by the Polish Cipher Bureau, as well as the device they\u2019d designed, the \u201cBomba.\u201d By July of 1939, Turing and Knox had developed a far more dependable version of \u201cBomba\u201d (spelling it Bombe).<\/p>\n\n\n\n On September 4, 1939 (the day after the UK declared war on Germany), Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of the GC&CS,<\/em> and immediately began work on what would become a series of cryptanalytical advances for the British War Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These advances included: deducing the \u201cindicator procedure\u201d used by the Nazi German navy; developing a statistical procedure dubbed \u201cBanburismus\u201d to be used specifically to help break German navel (Kriegsmarine) messages enciphered on \u201cEnigma\u201d machines; developing a manual code-breaking method dubbed \u201cTuringery,\u201d used specifically to decipher messages coded on the German\u2019s SZ40 and SZ42 teleprinter rotor stream cipher machines, and, towards the end of the war, development of a portable voice scrambler at Hanslope Park (home to HMGCC,<\/em> an organization that provided electronics to support the communication needs of the British Government), code-named, \u201cDelilah.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing\u2019s contributions to the British War effort were so scientifically advanced that the two papers he wrote on the code-breaking process, \u201cThe Applications of Probability to Cryptography\u201d and \u201cPaper on Statistics of Repetitions,\u201d were not released to the United Kingdom National Archives until April 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1945, after the war with Germany had ended, Turing was recruited by the National Physical Laboratory<\/em> (NPL<\/em>) in London to create an electronic computer, with the goal of being the first in the world to build an electronic stored-program, all-purpose, digital computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although various types of electronic computation devices were already in existence (the Colossus<\/em>, built in England in 1943, and the ENIAC<\/em>, built in the US earlier that year), they were purpose-specific, and few had stored-program capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing was the logical choice to design an all-purpose digital computer because, at that time, he understood more about building computational machines than anyone else on the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To design his \u201cTuring machine,\u201d Turing had to do more than just conceptualize<\/em> the functioning of a computer. He had to find a conclusive definition of what a computer is<\/em>. Having done so, Turing could now work out in great detail the basic concepts of a universal computing machine that could, in theory, do anything a special-purpose computing device could do\u2014but much more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing knew that an all-purpose computer could not be limited to solving just arithmetic problems. Of course, the internal state of the machine could represent numbers. It could also represent \u201clogic values\u201d or letters just as easily. Turing concluded that everything could be represented symbolically, even abstract mental states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing was one of the first proponents of the Artificial-Intelligence (AI) position that computers would one day have the capacity to \u201cthink.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Turing\u2019s initial work was entirely abstract and theoretical, he was confident that building a fully functioning machine of the sort he\u2019d envisioned was possible. So he challenged himself to build one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turing\u2019s ultimate answer to the task was the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE); essentially, the complete specifications for the first electronic stored-program, all-purpose, digital computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His colleagues at NPL, however, thought the engineering of the ACE too difficult to attempt, so they opted for a much smaller machine, which they called the Pilot Model ACE. Had Turing\u2019s original version been built as conceived, it would have had vastly more memory than any of the other early computers produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1947, Turing\u2019s interests turned to neurology, physiology, and athletics, so he signed up for classes at Cambridge University for the 1947-1948 academic year.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUniversity, Alonzo Church, \u201cTuring Machines\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Princeton University and Cryptology<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Bletchley Park<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Post-War and Development of the Computer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Cambridge, Physiology, Athletics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n