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Turing, Alan Mathison (1912-1954)

From The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Place : United States of America Subject : biography, computing, maths and statistics English mathematician who worked in numerical analysis and played a major part in the early development of British computers. Turing was born in London on 23 June 1912 into a family distinguished by its diplomats and engineers, three of whom had been elected to the Royal Society. He was educated at Sherborne School 1926-31, when he went to King's College, Cambridge to study mathematics. After receiving his BA in 1935, he was elected a fellow of the college on the strength of his paper ‘On the Gaussian error function’, which won a Smith's prize in mathematics in 1936. The paper was a characteristic example of the headstrong but brilliant nature of Turing's mathematical method throughout his life. He ‘discovered’ the central limit theorem in utter ignorance of the fact that it had already been discovered and proved. In 1936 Turing went to the USA for two years to work at Princeton University with the…
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Full text Article Alan Turing

From Great Thinkers A-Z
On 7 June 1954, Alan Turing, aged 41, ate an apple injected with cyanide. Thus died a man who laid the foundations for computer science; who, through his secret cryptological work, significantly contributed to the Allied victory in the Second World War; and who founded the artificial intelligence…
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This remarkable man must be credited with three innovations that bore on the programme of research that linked computing machines to human cognition. The first was the discovery of a set of rules and procedures by the use of which any computable function could be evaluated in a finite number of…
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Full text Article Turing, Alan Mathison (1912-1954)

From The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Place : United States of America Subject : biography, computing, maths and statistics English mathematician who worked in numerical analysis and played a major part in the early development of British computers. Turing was born in London on 23 June 1912 into a family distinguished by its diplomats…
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Full text Article TURING, ALAN MATHISON (1912–1954)

From Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements
Turing was a British mathematician best known for inventing the decoding machine that allowed the British to crack the German military code used during World War II, allowing the Allies to have better intelligence. His work also laid the foundation for modern computers. In 1952, after Turing filed a…
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Full text Article Alan Turing

From The Big Idea: How Breakthroughs of the Past Shape the Future Full text Article Information & Communication
In addition to the Turing machine, Alan Turing (1912-1954)—a British mathematician, logician, and cryptanalyst—devised code-breaking techniques during World War II; created the Automated Computing Engine while working at the National Physical Laboratory; and later in life became interested in…
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Full text Article Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–1954)

From Dictionary of Developmental Biology and Embryology
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Full text Article Artificial Intelligence

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology
Artificial intelligence, a field seeking to express human intelligence through machinery, predates the modern computing age. As a field of computer science, it includes two broad approaches to the study of human intelligence. The first approach attempts to identify laws of reasoning and express…
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Alan Turing
When a play based on the life of British mathematician Alan Turing was staged in 1986, its title was Breaking the Code . Turing had worked for the British government during World War II to decipher the German Enigma codes. His success helped give the British advance notice of German military plans. …
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