[January 28, 2016] One of the greatest threats to modern, interconnected society has been the development of cyber attacks that could possibly destroy that nation’s ability to defend itself and to supply needed services. Long before terrorists began using encrypted cell phones, humans began their efforts to decode enemy transmissions. Alan Turing was one of them; a British cryptologist during World War II.
Mathematics professor Turing became well known only after his highly secretive work during the war was declassified in the 1970s. He is best known for finding a method to break the coding of the German military’s legendary Enigma machine. As part of the all important work of codebreaking of German ciphers, he built a Turing machine that assisted in breaking the German Navy’s codes. This meant that the British could read German encoded messages.
The breaking of the German codes has been estimated to have saved millions of lives and shortened WWII by about two to four years. Turing and his small team of cryptologists played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that lead to the German defeat in several naval engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
After the war he continued to work on automatic machines, which today we call the forerunner to modern computers. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation.1 He has been called the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Sadly, in 1952 he was prosecuted for homosexual acts when it was still a criminal act in the United Kingdom. He died in 1954 in what appears to be a suicide at the age of 41. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon. He became wider known after the 2014 movie The Imitation Game was released.2
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
- For more on Alan Turing and his team, a very well constructed website details much of his works and has many links to original diagrams, notes, techniques, photos, etc: http://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/ww2.html