British mathematician and cryptographer, considered to be one of the fathers of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of algorithm and computation: the Turing machine.

Who was Alan Turing? Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time. (Website complements my book: Alan Turing: the enigma.)

Aspies typically have an almost obsessional approach to solving problems and are often oblivious to their peers' view that a given problem is 'unsolvable'. Both are often prerequisites to becoming an elite-end hacker.

The 'computable' numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means... According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine.

At a very early age, he is said to have taught himself to read in only three weeks and his discovery of numbers brought about the distracting habit of stopping at every street light in order to find its serial number.

Teaching Turing is a fun, educational environment for learning about and programming Turing machines. The goal of Teaching Turing is to show people how Turing machines work by having them program a Turing machine themselves. The structure of Teaching Turing is divided into a series of levels with the earliest stages very clearly walking the user through the basic controls of a Turing machine, then working up to a series of graphic puzzles solved through programming. We want to present the Turing machine in a simple, easy to understand way. Users can move at their own pace through the levels, or proceed to free exploration and programming of the machine.

Everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.

This digital archive contains mainly unpublished personal papers and photographs of Alan Turing from 1923-1972. The originals are in the Turing archive in King's College Cambridge.

The Turing Test, which has survived as our quintessential measure of intelligence in a machine, involves the ability of a computer to imitate human performance, particularly in the ability to engage in written dialog.