Alan Turing

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst and philosopher whose formal account of computation, the Turing machine, became a model of a general-purpose computer and made him widely regarded as the father of theoretical computer science. During the Second World War he worked at Britain's Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, leading the section that broke German naval ciphers and devising techniques, building on the earlier Polish bomba method, that helped the Allies read Enigma-enciphered traffic. After the war he designed one of the first stored-program computer architectures and turned to mathematical biology, writing on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicting oscillating reactions later confirmed in the laboratory. In 1952 he was prosecuted under British law for homosexual acts and accepted chemical castration rather than prison; he died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning, ruled a suicide though the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning, and he received an official government apology and a royal pardon decades later.