The mathematician Alan Turing is the father of our digital world
by Ray Monk / March 19, 2012 / Leave a commentPublished in April 2012 issue of Prospect Magazine
Creator and saviour? Turing spent the second world war at Bletchley Park, where he devoted himself to breaking the Enigma code
Digitized: The Science of Computers and How it Shapes Our World by Peter J Bentley, (Oxford University Press)
Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson (Allen Lane)
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (Centenary Edition, Vintage)
Alan M Turing by Sara Turing (Centenary Edition, Cambridge University Press)
A hundred years ago this June saw the birth of the man from whose brain sprang what is arguably the single most powerful idea of the 20th century, the idea that has done more than any other to influence our lives: the idea of the universal, digital computer.
The digital universe, writes George Dyson in Turing’s Cathedral, owes its beginnings to two prophets: the 17th-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, and the 20th-century mathematician and logician John von Neumann. “Alan Turing,” says Dyson, “arrived in between.” As Dyson’s own book makes clear, however, this account seriously understates Turing’s role in shaping the world in which we live.
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