ALAN TURING | AN OVERVIEW
Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician fascinated by computing. In fact, computing seemed to be his one sole interest as he spoke of little else. (Save, perhaps, for his side hobby as a long-distance runner.) Even when taking leisurely strolls with his mother, Turing couldn’t stop himself from going on tangents about the nature of numbers and coding. To little surprise, this eventually led him to graduate university with a degree in mathematics.
​
Soon after Turing's graduation, World War II seized the nations of the world and the mathematitian joined the war effort, but not as a soldier. Instead, Turing worked as part of a secret government division dedicated to code breaking. He was tasked with deciphering thousands of Nazi messages monthly amidst a small team of mathematicians. Turing’s occupation drove him to develop a machine that could compute numbers faster, almost instantaneously, in order to break encryptions at a rapid pace.
After the war, Turing used his experience developing computing machines to assist in the development of what most consider to be the first electronic computer. Additionally, he also created what is now commonly known as the “Turing Test,” which is a question based examination to determine whether a machine is intelligent.
Despite his accomplishments, Turing met an unfortunate end. The British government criminally prosecuted the mathematician for his homosexuality and placed him under 12 months of hormone therapy in an effort to “cure” his condition. The therapy diminished Turing’s physical state so severely that he was no longer able to indulge in his hobby as a runner. One month after his treatment ended, Turing died from cyanide poisoning in 1954. While not entirely confirmed, it is commonly presumed by most historians that Turing took his own life as a consequence of the stress hormone therapy imposed on him.