Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby.
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algorithm.
Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was a professor at Virginia Tech.
The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, written by John von Neumann in 1945, describing designs discussed with John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert at University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with these components:
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.
Thomas Harold Flowers MBE was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was a British early electronic serial stored-program computer design by Alan Turing. Turing completed the ambitious design in late 1945, having had experience in the years prior with the secret Colossus computer at Bletchley Park.
Enigma is a 2001 espionage thriller film directed by Michael Apted from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. The script was adapted from the 1995 novel Enigma by Robert Harris, about the Enigma codebreakers of Bletchley Park in the Second World War.
Brian Jack Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and author of books on the computing pioneer Alan Turing.
Shaun Wylie was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.
Rolf Noskwith was a British businessman who during the Second World War worked under Alan Turing as a cryptographer at the Bletchley Park British military base.
Breaking the Code is a 1986 British play by Hugh Whitemore about British mathematician Alan Turing, who was a key player in the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II and a pioneer of computer science. The play thematically links Turing's cryptographic activities with his attempts to grapple with his homosexuality.
The Alan Turing Year, 2012, marked the celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing during the centenary of his birth on 23 June 1912. Turing had an important influence on computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability and made important contributions to code-breaking during the Second World War. The Alan Turing Centenary Advisory committee (TCAC) was originally set up by Professor Barry Cooper
The Imitation Game is a 2014 American period biographical thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, based on the 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.
About 7,500 women worked in Bletchley Park, the central site for British cryptanalysts during World War II. Women constituted roughly 75% of the workforce there. While women were overwhelmingly under-represented in high-level work such as cryptanalysis, they were employed in large numbers in other important areas, including as operators of cryptographic and communications machinery, translators of Axis documents, traffic analysts, clerical workers, and more. Women made up the majority of Bletchley Park’s workforce, most enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, nicknamed the Wrens.
The Turing Guide, written by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, Robin Wilson, and others and published in 2017, is a book about the work and life of the British mathematician, philosopher, and early computer scientist, Alan Turing (1912–1954).
Alan Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. He left an extensive legacy in mathematics, science, society and popular culture.
