Alan Turing Is Born

Setting the scene

Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912, while his civil-servant parents were on leave from India. A precocious reader, he was fascinated by numbers and chemistry experiments as a boy at boarding school.

What happened

Turing studied at King's College, Cambridge, and Princeton, formalized computability with the Turing machine, and broke German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park during World War II, shortening the war by an estimated two years according to some historians.

Why it still matters

Prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, he accepted chemical castration and died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning ruled suicide. Memorable detail: the Turing test he proposed in 1950 asked whether a machine's conversation could be distinguished from a human's—a question still central to AI ethics.

Background

His WWII work at Bletchley Park remained secret for years.