Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician whose theories of computation helped establish computer science and whose wartime codebreaking aided the Allied victory.

Turing machine: An abstract machine that computes by following rules to read and write symbols on an unbounded tape. Turing introduced this model to define what a mechanical computation can do.
Bombe: An electromechanical device used by British cryptanalysts to find Enigma machine settings. Turing helped design the British Bombe used against German naval Enigma.
King's College, Cambridge: A constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded in 1441. Turing studied mathematics there and was elected a fellow in 1935.
Joan Clarke: A British cryptanalyst who worked at Bletchley Park and contributed to Enigma codebreaking. Clarke worked in Turing’s Hut 8 team and was briefly engaged to him.
Halting problem: The problem of deciding whether an arbitrary program will eventually stop or run forever. Turing proved that no algorithm can solve it for every possible program and input.
Computability theory: The mathematical study of which problems can be solved by algorithms. Turing’s work helped establish its limits and foundational questions.
Enigma machine: A rotor-based cipher machine used by Germany and other countries to encrypt messages. Breaking its naval traffic was a central challenge of Turing’s wartime work.
Princeton University: A private research university in Princeton, New Jersey, founded in 1746. Turing completed his doctorate there under Alonzo Church.
Gordon Welchman: A British mathematician and cryptanalyst who helped improve the Bombe’s efficiency. Welchman’s diagonal board complemented the machine Turing helped design.
Universal Turing machine: A Turing machine that can simulate any other Turing machine when given its description and input. It formalized the idea of one programmable machine executing many different procedures.

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