Alan Turing is a legend in computer science. Let me set aside that fact that he is seen as the father of modern computer science, and list off a few of his accomplishments:
- Principal participant in decoding German messages during WWII. Turing, using his incredible intellect, was a genuine war hero, helping to defeat the Nazis and save allied lives with his work.
- Author of the Turing Machine Thesis which outlines rules for determining artificial intelligence. This paper spawned an entire field of research, and many of the deeper concepts in it have shaped the thoughts of computer scientists for generations.
- “Co-author” of the Church-Turing Thesis, which outlines one of the core principals of computer science. The concept behind this thesis might be the most important in all of computer science.
In a recent post I shared some thoughts about having completed reading GEB. In GEB, Turing is a central figure along with other famous (and not so famous) intellects such as M.C. Escher, J.S. Bach, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Euclid and others. Outside his famous AI paper Turing and others developed important theories about computation and computer science. The design of computer languages was forever changed with the concept of Turing-completeness. From a programming perspective, this means that no language will ever be more powerful than what we now have. Our currently languages do a few important things that cannot be improved upon: they have variable substitution, they have recursion, and they have unbounded loops. Turing and Church showed this, and others along with Turing have provided various logical/mathematical proofs on the subject.
After reading GEB I promised myself I would start reading about and exploring the ideas of the people quoted throughout the book. I have started with Turing. Charles Petzold has written a great book titled The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
I just started last night but I am already getting into the book. I am looking forward to digging back into it tonight.
Before I end this post it should be mentioned that Alan Turing, a man who had a significant impact decoding German codes in WWII and was one of the most influential people in the 20th century, was gay. Through unfortunate circumstances this fact was made public in 1952. At the time it was considered a crime and Turing was persecuted by the British. Turing’s friends and family describe him as a gentle soul and towering intellect. He was found dead on June 8th, 1954 from an apparent suicide. He was only 42. Think what else he might have acomplished had not such a bigotted response fall upon him.
