Alan Turing Quotes


The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.


Context

He was one of the fathers of modern computer science and the first serious programmer. Before there were computers generally available, he had programmed special IBM machines to crack the German’s “uncrackable” Enigma code.


Citations

Alan Turing, 1912–1954, British mathematician and cryptographer, Chief Codebreaker for The Allied WWII Intelligence Effort, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

He was one of the team that created the first Atomic Bomb. In 1946, the atomic bomb was known about by almost all Americans and almost no one had even heard of a computer or the concept of a computer. The British and Americans during the war had collaborated to build very limited electronic calculating machines but the concept of programs to control the calculating machines was new—initially created by van Neumann and Englishman Alan Turing. When he made this statement most people thought it was the ravings of a “mad scientist. He was one of the team that later developed the first real computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.”


Alan Turing
Alan Turing
  • Born: June 23, 1912
  • Died: June 7, 1954
  • Nationality: English
  • Profession: Mathematician

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.