Alan Turing

British mathematician, logician, scientist and the technical genius behind Britain’s successful efforts to break German codes in World War II, Turing made inestimable contributions to cybernetics. His "Computable Numbers," 1937, is considered one of the outstanding scientific papers of the 20th century, a blueprint for what would become the electronic digital computer. His "Universal Turing Machine" was an ancestor for the entire information age.

Turing was the second-born of two sons to a member of the British civil service in India. His mother didn’t feel that was a suitable environment, and so the boys were both raised in foster households in England, separated from their parents. At 13, he enrolled at the Sherbourne School in Dorset where he showed a gift for mathematics. While at Sherbourne, Turing, who recognized his homosexuality, fell in love with another boy at the school who suddenly died of tuberculosis. The event drove him into atheism and the conviction that phenomena must all have materialistic explanations.

He failed twice to win a fellowship at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College, but did receive one from King’s College in Cambridge. There he found a good environment in which to thrive. He was invited to remain at King’s as a tutor when he obtained his degree.

World War II intervened, and based on his published work, he was recruited to serve in the Government Code and Cypher School. The task there was to break the Nazis’ Enigma codes. It is now known that Turing played a crucial role in the effort by inventing a primitive machine that could decipher at high speed Nazi codes to ships in the North Atlantic.

At the end of the war, Turing hoped to pick up the academic career he had started, but the mathematics division of the British National Physical Laboratory asked him to create an actual Turing machine. He accepted, but found himself mired in bureaucracy, missing the wartime state of urgency that quickly bypassed obstacles.