Possibly an inadequate title, the Founder of Computer Science, is what Alan Mathison Turing is called by the technological community. Born in a nursing home in Paddington, London with the strong desire to learn, Turing would soon grow to be one of the most ingenious mathematical logicians ever to grace his field.
Turing was a man who accomplished his successes without outside motivation to do so. His family, being an upper-middle-class group with no scientific knowledge or interests, left Turing to develop his interests for mathematics and science on his own. This interest is believed to have been sparked by a book he read at around the age of fourteen entitled, “Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know”(Hodges 22).
Through reading books of this type and in honor of a deceased intellectual companion named Christopher Morcom, Turing gained the drive to make strives in the world of technology.
Turing’s received his first public recognition in the field of mathematics directly after graduating from King’s College, when he won a Smith’s prize for his work on probability theory in 1936 (Kowalik 2).
It was around this time when Turing became intrigued by the mathematical question of decidability, otherwise known as the Entscheidungsproblem. This problem asked the question, “could there exist, at least in principle, any definite method or process by which all mathematical questions could be decided?” With his amazing mathematical ingenuity, Turing was able to supply a precise method to solve this almost impossible problem.
The Term Paper on History Free Responce Questions
AP US HISTORY FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS SINCE 1971 I. Colonial Time 1607 – 1775 1. Puritanism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Apply this generalization. (74) 2. In the seventeenth century, New England Puritans tried to create a model society. What were their aspirations, and to what extent were those aspirations fulfilled during the seventeenth century? (83) 3. Between ...
The method that Turing constructed became the foundation of modern computation, and was later called the Turing Machine. It was a machine that Turing claimed could equal or exceed the logic of a person working on a set of logical instructions. The function of the machine was to accept algorithms, as we call them today, and solve problems dealing with computable numbers (Kowalik 2).
He first released his findings in a paper entitled, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Although this was probably Turing’s greatest accomplishment, he soon became interested in ciphers used during wartime, and would lend a helping hand to the British forces during WWII (Turing 2).
Early on in the war, Germany had developed something called an Enigma Machine, which generated undecipherable code that was transmitted between German forces. Upon the entrance of Britain into the war, Turing took up the job of trying to crack the codes of the Enigma Machine. By 1939 with the help of a Polish mathematician named Welchman, Turing built the Bombe, a machine that was able to translate the signals of the Enigma. Furthermore, Turing also placed a huge effort towards encoding signals that were sent between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
Following his work during the war, Turing took the job as Deputy Director of the computing laboratory at Manchester University. Here he drew up his Morphogenic theory of growth and form in biology (A. Turing 4).
It was during this time that Turing was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a young Manchester man. Rather than go to prison, Turing opted to receive injections of oestrogen to neutralize his libido, for a period of one year. Despite this setback, he continued his work on the morphogenic theory, and set a goal to discover then reason for the appearance of Fibonacci numbers in leaf patterns of plants. Unfortunately Turing’s work did not extend much further that this.
After a life full of contributions the world of computability Turing’s time came to a sudden end. On June 8, 1954 Alan Turing was found dead by his cleaner. He had died of cyanide poisoning and was found with a half-eaten apple beside his body. The coroner’s report pointed to suicide, an unfitting end to such a valuable life.
The Essay on How A Fax Machine Works
It is very typical and practical in an office to have a fax machine. Every time you walk in to an office, you may see one of these machines but have you ever wondered how they work? Have you ever thought, how can a machine transfer information from one phone to another without really sending the original document? Some people might think it’s magic but it is actually not. It is science in use, ...
Works Cited
“Alan Turing—A Short Biography”. Internet. 4/19/99. www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/
Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York, Simon and Schuster. 1984.
John M. Kowalik. “Alan Turing”. Internet. 4/19/99. www.ei.cs.vt.edu/
“Turing”. Internet. 4/19/99. www.turing.sunyit.edu/
