Alan Turing and the Turing Machine

Abstract By marking its fiftieth anniversary, this volume recognizes the long-lasting influence of the Turing machine concept. By collecting together new contributions from so many fields, it signals the exceptionally wide scope of that influence. This brief essay, intended to recall and honor the person of Alan M.

Turing himself, will likewise mark not only the historical moment of Turing’s publication, but will seek to convey the breadth of thought that underlay his introduction and development of the machine concept. Alan Turing was born on 23 June 1912, and after submitting to a traditional British upper-middle-class schooling, won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge University. He graduated with distinction in mathematics in 1934.

Within less than a year he was elected to a Fellowship of King’s College, his dissertation being a proof of the Central Limit Theorem, and it might have appeared that his interests would focus on the theory of probability.