Alan Mathison Turing Biography

Birth of Alan Mathison Turing

Begins attending Hazelhurst preparatory school, where his letters already show a strong interest in mathematics, chemistry and invention.

Moves from Hazelhurst to Sherborne School in Dorset for his secondary education.

Forms an important intellectual friendship with fellow Sherborne pupil Christopher Morcom, sharing interests in mathematics and science.

After Christopher Morcom dies, Turing becomes increasingly interested in questions linking mind, matter, mathematics and scientific explanation.

Begins undergraduate study of mathematics at Cambridge, developing interests that later lead into mathematical logic and computation.

Wins an Open Scholarship in Mathematics to Kings College, Cambridge.

Matriculates at Kings College, Cambridge, to read Mathematics.

Receives a First in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge.

Is elected a Fellow of Kings College for his mathematical work.

Completes fellowship work titled On the Gaussian Error Function, demonstrating his growing strength in probability and analysis.

Begins doctoral study with logician Alonzo Church, connecting Turings machine approach with contemporary work on effective calculability.

Provides a precise mathematical account of what it means for a number or function to be computable by an effective mechanical procedure.

Uses his machine model to show that there can be no general mechanical procedure deciding every statement in the relevant formal system.

Completes the draft of On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

Receives the Smiths Prize for mathematical work at Cambridge.

Introduces an abstract machine model that formalises step-by-step mechanical computation.

Shows that one universal machine can simulate the operation of any machine described by a finite table of instructions.

Travels to Princeton University for advanced research in mathematical logic under Alonzo Church.

Writes from Princeton about his interest in constructing unusual cipher systems, showing that cryptography was already part of his technical thinking.

Publishes a correction to On Computable Numbers, refining details of his foundational computability paper.

Builds a small electronic multiplier while at Princeton as part of experimental work connected with enciphering machinery.

Begins consulting for the Government Code and Cypher School before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Develops the idea of machines that can consult an external oracle when studying relative computability and unsolvable problems.

Completes doctoral work on systems of logic based on ordinals, extending formal reasoning beyond fixed logical systems.

Receives his PhD from Princeton University for research in mathematical logic.

Returns to Kings College after completing his Princeton doctorate.

Begins constructing an analogue mechanical device intended to investigate numerical aspects of the Riemann hypothesis.

Declines an opportunity associated with John von Neumann and chooses to return to his fellowship at Cambridge.

Is assigned to the Bletchley Park section that becomes responsible for attacking German Naval Enigma.

Concentrates on the particularly difficult problem of German Naval Enigma and U-boat communications.

Publishes Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, developed from his Princeton doctoral research.

The day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reports to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of GC&CS

Develops Banburismus, a statistical method that reduces the number of Naval Enigma rotor settings requiring Bombe tests.

Develops the central logical design used by the British Bombe to search efficiently for possible Enigma settings.

Heads Hut 8 during the early development of systematic methods for breaking German Naval Enigma.

Meets Polish cryptanalysts in Paris and absorbs techniques that influence the British Bombe design.

The first operational break into Enigma when the team working under Dilly Knox, with the mathematicians John Jeffreys, Peter Twinn and Alan Turing, unravelled the German Army administrative key that became known at Bletchley Park as The Green, encouraged by this success, the codebreakers later crack the Red key used by the Luftwaffe

The first operational break into Enigma when the team working under Dilly Knox, with the mathematicians John Jeffreys, Peter Twinn and Alan Turing, unravelled the German Army administrative key that became known at Bletchley Park as The Green, encouraged by this success, the codebreakers later crack the Red key used by the Luftwaffe

The first bombe is installed

Produces a detailed cryptanalytic reference manual on Naval Enigma known at Bletchley Park as Profs Book.

Writes technical material for American cryptanalysts explaining methods used against German Naval Enigma.

Develops statistical reasoning for Banburismus that becomes an original contribution to sequential analysis.

Uses captured German naval cryptographic material to strengthen Hut 8 attacks on U-boat Enigma.

Hut 8 work, including Turings methods, helps make the German U-boat key Dolphin readable on a near-daily basis during the summer.

Has set up a good working system for decrypting Enigma signals but there were only a few bombes so not enough time to translate all the signals, in the summer there was considerable success and shipping losses had fallen to under 100,000 tons a month

Turing proposes marriage to Hut 8 co-worker Joan Clarke, a fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst, but their engagement is short-lived after admitting his homosexuality to his fiancee, who is reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decides that he cannot not go through with the marriage

Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.", more than two hundred bombes were in operation by the end of the war.

This record states: Churchill then wrote a memo to General Ismay which read: "ACTION THIS DAY.

This record states: Writes directly to Churchill spelling out his difficulties emphasising how small the need is compared with the vast expenditure of men and money by the forces and compared with the level of assistance they could offer.

Applies statistical analysis to the Fish cipher problem, influencing later mechanised attacks on Lorenz traffic.

Develops a statistical technique later called Turingery for attacking German Lorenz teleprinter cipher traffic.

Faces the loss of readable U-boat traffic when four-rotor Naval Enigma creates the Shark blackout.

Leaves Britain for the United States to assist cooperation on high-speed Bombe development and secure communications.

Studies secure voice communications at Bell Laboratories while in the United States.

Begins work with Donald Bayley on the portable secure-speech system code-named Delilah.

Designs a system intended to encipher speech for transmission by telephone line or short-distance radio.

Works closely with engineer Donald Bayley on electronics, experiments and circuitry for Delilah.

Works with American cryptographic specialists on high-speed Bombe technology for attacking Enigma traffic.

Moves to Hanslope Park to work on secure voice communications rather than returning to full-time Hut 8 work.

Returns to Britain after his American cryptographic and secure-speech mission.

Completes experimental work leading to a functioning prototype of the Delilah secure voice encoder.

Tests Delilah concepts for secure speech transmission over telephone lines and VHF radio links.

Takes responsibility for developing the concept that becomes the Automatic Computing Engine project.

Applies his universal-machine ideas to the practical design of an electronic stored-program computer.

Writes a historical and technical account of Hut 8 Naval Enigma work through December 1941.

Joins the National Physical Laboratory to work on the design of a new electronic computer.

Turing is awarded the OBE by King George VI for his wartime services, but his work remains secret for many years

NPL accepts Turings technical architecture for the Automatic Computing Engine.

Designs ACE around mercury acoustic delay-line storage, then considered a practical high-speed electronic memory technology.

Prioritises very high processing speed and efficient instruction execution in the ACE design.

Develops an instruction system intended to make efficient use of ACE memory and electronic arithmetic units.

Specifies a computer in which instructions and numerical data are held in electronic memory for automatic execution.

Begins giving lectures on electronic computer design and the principles underlying the proposed ACE.

Works on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL)presents a paper which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer

Lectures on the Automatic Computing Engine and explains how electronic machinery can implement general-purpose computation.

Takes leave from NPL and returns to Cambridge for a period of theoretical research.

Discusses the possibility of computer intelligence in lectures on machine design, anticipating his later artificial-intelligence work.

Studies neurology and physiology while reconsidering how learning and brain organisation might inform machine intelligence.

Begins writing a chess program for a computer that does not yet exist

Leaves the National Physical Laboratory after delays in constructing the full ACE design.

Describes a generalisation of Choleskys method with advantages for numerical accuracy and convenience.

Writes the NPL report Intelligent Machinery, one of the earliest substantial discussions of machine intelligence.

Explores the idea that intelligent behaviour can emerge by training a machine through experience and modification.

Moves to the University of Manchester as Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory.

Begins contributing to the practical and theoretical development of the Manchester Mark I computer.

Shows that several standard matrix methods need not suffer catastrophic exponential accumulation of rounding error.

Publishes Practical Forms of Type Theory, proposing nested-type and concealed-type logical systems.

Publishes a major numerical-analysis paper examining error growth in methods for solving linear equations and inverting matrices.

Introduces unorganised machines as networks whose behaviour can be trained rather than completely fixed in advance.

Works on early software requirements needed to make the Manchester Mark I useful to mathematical programmers.

Helps obtain paper-tape equipment and assists with attaching it to the Manchester Mark I.

Is chiefly responsible for the base-32 notation used by programmers working with the Manchester and Ferranti machines.

Proposes building a simpler child machine and educating it rather than attempting to program an adult-level mind directly.

Publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence in Mind, establishing a foundational text of artificial intelligence.

Contributes to additional Ferranti Mark I instructions, notably the random-number generator order.

Recasts the question of whether machines can think as the operational imitation game later known as the Turing Test.

Argues that learning and adaptation should be central to the development of intelligent machines.

Systematically examines and answers major philosophical, mathematical and practical objections to the possibility of machine intelligence.

Designs the Scheme A method of organising programs and subroutines with Cicely Popplewell for the Ferranti Mark I.

Connects the universality of digital computers with the possibility that suitably programmed machines could display many forms of intelligent behaviour.

Encourages Christopher Stracheys early computer work and provides access to programming information for the Manchester machine.

Is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his major contributions to mathematics and computation.

Continues lecturing on whether digital computers can think and on the future development of machine intelligence.

Writes the first edition of the Programmers Handbook for the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II.

Documents programming conventions, coding examples, routine organisation and practical methods for users of the Manchester computer.

Takes a leading role in preparing programmers to use the Ferranti Mark I delivered to Manchester.

Submits his major manuscript on the mathematical basis of biological pattern formation to the Royal Society.

Uses numerical and computational thinking to explore non-linear biological pattern formation and the onset of instability.

Uses the term morphogens for interacting chemical substances whose reaction and diffusion can organise developing biological form.

Shows mathematically how interacting chemical substances that diffuse at different rates can generate spatial biological patterns.

Analyses conditions under which reaction-diffusion systems can produce stationary wave-like patterns in a ring of cells.

Explains how a homogeneous chemical state can become unstable and develop organised spatial structure after small disturbances.

Please "guilty", in spite of the fact that he felt no remorse or guilt for having committed acts of homosexuality, Turing is convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation, which would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido, accepts treatment via injections of stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen

Publishes The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Investigates mathematical relationships between morphogenesis, phyllotaxis and Fibonacci-type structures in plants.

Extends his morphogenesis research toward the mathematical study of leaf arrangement and plant pattern formation.

Death of Alan Mathison Turing, suicide by cyanide poisoning

Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for technical or theoretical contributions to the computing community, widely considered to be the computing worlds highest honour, equivalent to the Nobel Prize