ProofWiki:Mathematicians/Alan Mathison Turing

English mathematician who is often considered to be the "father of modern computer science".

Famous for his conception of the Turing machine and the Turing test.

Committed suicide as a result of persecution for being different.

Nationality

English

History

• Born: 23 June 1912, London, England
• Died: 7 June 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire, England

Theorems and Definitions

• Turing Machine
• Turing Test
• Church-Turing Thesis (otherwise known as Church's Thesis) (with Alonzo Church)
• Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle (a stronger version of the Church-Turing Thesis formulated by David Deutsch)

Books and Papers

• 1935: On the Gaussian error function
• 1936: On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem (in which the Turing machine was introduced)
• 1939: Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals
• 1950: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (in which the Turing test was introduced)

Also see

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "Alan Mathison Turing": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive