Who is Alan Turing?
Alan Turing (1912 – 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer considered by many to be the father of computer science. His contributions to breaking the German Nazi Enigma code during WWII were considered pivotal to the Allied war effort. Alan Turing formulated multiple ideas that now lie at the foundations of computer science and computability theory, such as the idea of a Turing machine or the Church-Turing thesis. A Turing machine is a simple mathematical construct that can be imagined as a recordable tape of infinite length coupled to a mechanical unit with read/write capability. The unit can perform only three actions; read a bit of the tape and return the result; write a bit on the tape; or erase a preexisting bit. Turing’s Church-Turing thesis, formulated with Alonzo Church, states that such a Turing machine can theoretically compute any algorithm given enough time and storage space. It also states that any practical computing model must be a type of Turing
