Alan Turing 1912 – 1954
Alan Turing (1912 – 1954) was a British philosopher of the Contemporary era, associated with Analytic Philosophy.
Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of mind who is widely regarded as the founder of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. His 1936 paper On Computable Numbers introduced the notion of a universal computing machine and gave the first sustained mathematical treatment of effective computation. His wartime work at Bletchley Park on the Enigma cipher contributed decisively to Allied victory. His 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence proposed the test that bears his name as a way of approaching the question whether machines can think. Persecuted for his homosexuality, he died at forty-one.
Alan Mathison Turing was born in 1912 in London, the son of a member of the Indian Civil Service. He read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, was elected a fellow of King's at twenty-two on the strength of a dissertation on the central limit theorem, and in 1936 submitted to the London Mathematical Society the paper 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem'. He took his Princeton doctorate in 1938 under Alonzo Church.
From 1939 he worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where his designs for the electromechanical bombes were central to the breaking of the German Enigma cipher. After the war he worked on the ACE computer at the National Physical Laboratory and from 1948 at Manchester on the Manchester Mark 1. His major papers include 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950), with the imitation game now called the Turing test, and 'The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis' (1952), a founding paper of mathematical biology.
Turing's analysis of mechanical computation through the abstract machine that bears his name laid the conceptual foundations of computer science and artificial intelligence; his philosophical question 'can machines think?' shaped half a century of subsequent debate. Prosecuted under the Labouchere Amendment in 1952 for a homosexual relationship and sentenced to chemical castration, he died at Wilmslow in June 1954, by the official verdict by suicide; he was posthumously pardoned in 2013.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic Philosophy
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Alan Turing:
“Can machines think?”
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“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
p. 460. -
Attributed to Alan Turing:
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
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“Mathematical reasoning is the exercise of a combination of two faculties: intuition and ingenuity.”
Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals," section 11: The purpose of ordinal logics (1938), published in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, series 2, vol. 45 (1939) | In a footnote to the first sentence, Turing added: "We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as -
Attributed to Alan Turing:
“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
Alan Turing by topic
Frequently asked about Alan Turing
- When did Alan Turing live?
- Alan Turing was born in 1912 and died in 1954.
- Where was Alan Turing from?
- Alan Turing was a British philosopher of the Contemporary era.
- What philosophical movements is Alan Turing associated with?
- Alan Turing was associated with Analytic Philosophy.
- What was Alan Turing known for?
- Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of mind who is widely regarded as the founder of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
- How many quotes are attributed to Alan Turing?
- There are 23 attributed quotations from Alan Turing in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.