Alan Turing (* June 23rd, 1912 in London) is a British Logician, Mathematician, and cryptanalyist.
Even in his early childhood, Turing's high gifts and Intelligence showed. It's stated that he taught himself to read in a timespan of mere three Weeks and was interested very early in numbers and riddles. At the age of 16, he read and understood Albert Einstein's theory of Relativity. 1931 through 1934, he studied Mathematics in Cambridge.
In his - for this branch of Mathematics - ground-breaking work On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the „Entscheidungsproblem“ (May 28th, 1936), Turing formulated Kurt Gödel's results from 1931 anew. For this, he replaced Gödel's universal, arithmetics-based formal language by a simple hypothetical Mechanism, a mathematical Machine processing abstract-formal strings of characters, later to be known by the Name of Turing machines. Turing proved that such a machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.
Turing spent the years 1938 and 1939 mostly at the Princeton University and studied there under Alonzo Church. In 1938, he acquired a Ph.D. in Princeton. His thesis introduced the term of „Hypercomputation“, which extended Turing machines to so-called Oracle Machines. This was how Studying non-deterministically solvable Problems became possible.
Since September 1938, he works for the British government as a cryptanalyist, aiming at breaking the German Enigma. During World War II, Turing is one of the most distinguished scientists in Bletchley Park. He had to sign the Official Secrets Act to work there, which forbids him telling anything about it, even for the future.
He's generally considered as a genius, if an eccentric one. He keeps his Homosexuality a secret, since it's still outlawed.
