Alan Turing And His Legacy

Without mathematics our life would be in chaos, there is not a day that goes by that we don’t use math. Whether you’re at the grocery store, balancing a checkbook, cooking, etc, you’re using math. “Math helps to resolve truths and uncover errors” as said by Galileo Galilei. This one mathematician Alan Turing once said, “mathematical reasoning may be regarded.” Alan Turing is a mathematician who lived his short life of 41 years publishing many pieces of articles and making many discoveries. All of Turing’s discoveries helped shape our world in some way. Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in Paddington, London. Because Turing’s father wanted him to have the best education, he sent him to Sherborne boarding school. His talents were ignored growing up at boarding school. When Alan reached the age of 16, he was already grasping Albert Einstein’s concepts at a very fast pace and started to question Newton’s “Laws of Motion”. Alan Turing has contributed to math and helped solve countless real-world problems. Most of the technology we use in our everyday lives we have because of Turing; his greatest contribution is known as the concept of the universal Turing machine “built” in 1936, this is known to be one of the most widely used machines, which you know as the computers. This machine was invented to serve for mathematical calculations. In 1950 Turing had developed the Turing test, this test would determine if a computer could “think.” This test was able to tell if machines like computers were able to give off human-like responses.

Alan also played a key role in World War II, during the war he worked as a codebreaker at the government code and cipher school. He was one of the top cryptographers, his job was to decipher Germany’s enigma cipher. This was known to be one of the most difficult codes to decipher at the time. Thanks to Turing this enigma was resolved, which helped win the war. After WWII had ended, Turing went to work for the National Physical Laboratory, where he worked with several colleges to create the very first electronic computer. Electronic computers are built from Turing’s mathematical developments and discoveries. The original design Turing created for the computer was not built, this was because his colleagues thought it would be too difficult with the engineering to pull off. Turing’s original computer design would’ve been faster and have more memory at the time.

I believe that Turing didn’t get the full recognition that he deserved for all his contributions. Turing had this vision for how machines would come to help us in the future. With all his mathematical findings and inventions, scientists were able to build off it. Despite all of his contributions in the mid-1900s Turing dealt with numerous adversities with the authorities about his sexuality towards men, this got him shunned. In 1954 Turing was found dead in his home due to cyanide poisoning, this was believed to be a suicide. Thanks to Turing and his legacy he was able to shape our future for the better.