15 Riveting Facts About Alan Turing
BY Shaunacy Ferro
June 23, 2018
More than six decades after his death, Alan Turing’s life remains a point of fascination—even for people who have no interest in his groundbreaking work in computer science. He has been the subject of a play and an opera, and referenced in multiple novels and numerous musical albums. The Benedict Cumberbatch film about his life, The Imitation Game, received eight Oscar nominations. But just who was he in real life? Here are 15 facts you should know about Alan Turing, who was born on this day in 1912.
1. HE’S THE FATHER OF MODERN COMPUTER SCIENCE.
Turing essentially pioneered the idea of computer memory. In 1936, Turing published a seminal paper called “On Computable Numbers†[PDF], which The Washington Post has called “the founding document of the computer age.†In the philosophical article, he hypothesized that one day, we could build machines that could compute any problem that a human could, using 0s and 1s. Turing proposed single-task machines called Turing machines that would be capable of solving just one type of math problem, but a “universal computer†would be able to tackle any kind of problem thrown at it by storing instructional code in the computer’s memory. Turing’s ideas about memory storage and using a single machine to carry out all tasks laid the foundation for what would become the digital computer.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/503325/15-riveting-facts-about-alan-turing
