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1-Page Summary of Alan Turing
Genio excéntrico
Alan Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912. His parents were wealthy and he attended the elite private school Hazelhurst. He went to Sherborne School in Dorset where his interest in mathematics began. In 1932, he won a scholarship to King’s College at Cambridge University. He earned a research position there and the prestigious journal Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) published his first paper.
La máquina universal de Turing
After researching a foundational mathematical problem, Turing wrote the research paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in 1936. The journal Proceedings of the LMS published his work again. Today it is considered the cornerstone of computer science. Turing studied at Princeton University and finished his Ph.D. in only 18 months—not three years like usual for most students there. In his thesis, he speculated prophetically about oracle machines: models of computers that communicate with outside databases, such as laptops or smart phones which accesses Internet information via web pages (World Wide Web). After finishing school, he returned to England and took a position at King’s College where he continued doing research on mathematics and computing until World War II broke out when Britain declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.
A talk by Max Newman inspired Alan Turing to invent the modern computer. At that time, computers were known as people who performed mathematical procedures from memory. Newman theorized about machines that would do the same repetitive functions as humans. This inspired Turing to conceptualize a general-purpose perfect computer, which would become the universal Turing machine. In theory, it could have an infinite memory – endless tape – a scanner for reading and writing information on the tape including program and computing data. It was during World War II when both men figured out how to build one that worked.
Enigma y Tunny
In 1939, England was at war with Germany. Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. He was one of about 30 codebreakers whose job it was to crack German codes such as Enigma, the military encryption machine similar to a typewriter used by the Germans.
Turing was worried that a Nazi invasion would cause financial catastrophe, so he converted his savings into silver bullion and buried it in two different places. However, he forgot where they were.
In the early 1940s, British codebreakers were focusing on specific aspects of the German army. They focused on U-Boats, tanks and planes. By this time, Turing’s anti-Enigma machine was fully operational. The Polish government called it a bomba, which is derived from bomb. Dilly Knox referred to Turing as “the boy bombe-llo”.
During World War II, Turing’s bombes decoded 84 million Enigma messages per month. The Allies knew the Nazi military plans in detail within a few hours of their transmission to units in the field, ships and submarines. Towards the end of the war there were almost 2,000 people working on German codes.
Turing also decrypted Tunny, another German code. His colleagues referred to his incredible system as “turingery”. Turing’s arduous work helped significantly in the war efforts. Some military historians claim that the giant organization of cryptanalysis—in particular, the deciphering of Enigma U-boat codes, in which Turing played a major role—shortened by between two and four years the European scene of World War II.
Since each year of war caused about seven million deaths, it is not unreasonable to estimate that, without Turing’s work, there would have been another 14 to 21 million casualties. Along with Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, Alan Turing was one of the heroes of the Allied victory in World War II.
