Abstract
Alan Turing was a British mathematician and computer scientist who made fundamental contributions to mathematics and computer science. He made important contributions to computability with his theoretical Turing machine, cryptology and breaking the German Enigma naval codes at Bletchley Park code-breaking centre during the Second World War; he contributed to the development of software for the Manchester Mark 1 at Manchester University; and he contributed to the emerging field of artificial intelligence.
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Notes
- 1.
The Sherborne is located in Dorset, England. Its origins go back to the eighth century when the school was linked with the Benedictine Abbey in the town.
- 2.
We may also allow no movement of the tape head to be represented by adding the symbol ‘N’ to the set.
- 3.
However, Turing machines are in my view more intuitive than the lambda calculus.
- 4.
Alonzo Church was a famous American mathematician and logician who developed the lambda calculus. He also showed that Peano arithmetic and first-order logic were undecidable. Lambda calculus is equivalent to Turing machines in that whatever is computed may be computed by Lambda calculus or a Turing machine. This is known as the Church-Turing thesis.
- 5.
The British Empire was essentially over at the end of the Second World War with the United States becoming the dominant world power. India achieved independence from Britain in 1947, and former colonies gradually declared independence from Britain in the following years.
References
John E. Hopcroft and Jeffrey D.: Ullman. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation. Addison-Wesley. (1979)
Searle, J.: Minds, brains, and programs. Behav. Brain Sci. 3, 417–457 (1980)
Turing, A.: Computing, machinery and intelligence. Mind 49, 433–460 (1950)
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O’Regan, G. (2012). Alan Turing. In: A Brief History of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2359-0_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2359-0_14
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