Who Was Alan Turing?

1. A schoolboy who read the universe

Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June 1912 in Maida Vale, London, the younger son of Julius Mathison Turing, a civil servant in the Indian Civil Service, and Ethel Sara Stoney. He was raised in southern England and educated at Sherborne School, where his talent for mathematics and science stood out early, though his teachers were often frustrated by his untidiness and his refusal to do things the conventional way. He read widely in science and mathematics as a schoolboy, and in 1931 he entered King's College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and graduated with first-class honours in 1934. He was elected a fellow of King's College in 1935, at the age of 22, and from 1936 to 1938 he studied at Princeton University, where he completed a PhD in mathematical logic under Alonzo Church.

The schoolboy Turing was already thinking about the questions that would define his career: what is a machine, what can it do, and what is the difference between a mind and a mechanism? He was not a child prodigy in the usual sense; he was a deep thinker who worked slowly and independently, and who was often more interested in the foundations of a subject than in its applications. His teachers at Sherborne thought him difficult; his teachers at Cambridge recognised him as exceptional. The difference was that Cambridge gave him problems worthy of his mind, and he answered them with a paper that changed the world.

There is a point worth making about Turing's early life that is often lost in the drama of his later years. He was not an outsider who stumbled into greatness; he was a product of the British mathematical tradition at its best, trained at Cambridge and Princeton by the leading logicians of the day, and his work was recognised by his peers from the start. What made him different was not his training but his imagination: he asked questions that other mathematicians had not thought to ask, and he answered them with a clarity that made the answers seem obvious once they were given. That combination of rigour and imagination is rare, and it is the reason his work has lasted.

2. The Turing machine: computing before computers

In 1936 Turing published On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, a paper that defined computability through the Turing machine, an abstract model that defined what a computer could in principle do. The machine is simple to describe: an endless tape divided into squares, a head that reads and writes symbols, and a set of rules that tells the head what to do next. From this simple model Turing proved that there are problems no machine can solve, the most famous being the halting problem, the question of whether a program will ever stop. The paper also introduced the idea of a universal machine, a single machine that could imitate any other machine by reading its description, which is the principle behind every modern computer.

The importance of the 1936 paper is hard to overstate. Before Turing, a computer was a person who computed, usually a woman employed to do arithmetic by hand. After Turing, a computer was a machine defined by what it could do in principle, and the question of what machines could do became a mathematical question rather than an engineering one. His model is still the standard definition of computation, and it is used to prove what computers can and cannot do. Ada Lovelace had imagined a general-purpose machine a century earlier; Turing proved what such a machine could and could not do, and in doing so he founded computer science as a discipline.

It is worth pausing on how abstract this work was. Turing wrote his paper before any electronic computer existed, and he was not trying to build one. He was trying to answer a question in mathematical logic, posed by the German mathematician David Hilbert, about whether mathematics could be decided by a mechanical procedure. His answer was no, and the machine he invented to prove it was a thought experiment. That a thought experiment about logic became the blueprint for the most important technology of the twentieth century is one of the great ironies of science, and it is a reminder that the most practical ideas often begin as the most abstract ones. Turing himself did not foresee the computer industry; he foresaw the limits of computation, and the industry was built on his foundations.

3. Bletchley Park: breaking naval Enigma

On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Turing reported to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. There he led Hut 8, the section attacking German naval Enigma, the cipher machine used by the German navy to communicate with its U-boats. The German navy changed its codes daily, and its messages were the key to the Battle of the Atlantic: if Britain could read them, it could route its convoys around the U-boats; if it could not, ships and sailors would be lost in numbers that could have starved Britain into surrender. Turing's Bombe, an electromechanical machine that tested possible Enigma settings, and his statistical methods for narrowing the search, made it possible to read naval Enigma regularly, and his work is widely credited with shortening the war.

The scale of the achievement is worth understanding. Enigma had billions of possible settings, and the German navy believed it was unbreakable. Turing's insight was not to try every setting, which was impossible, but to use the structure of the messages themselves, the cribs, to eliminate most settings at once. He also designed the Bombe to test the remaining settings mechanically, at a speed no human could match. The work was a combination of mathematics, engineering and organisation, and it required a team of hundreds of people, most of them women, working in shifts around the clock. Turing was not a lone genius at Bletchley; he was the leader of a team, and his genius was to see the problem clearly and to design a system that could solve it.

The secrecy that surrounded Bletchley Park has shaped Turing's reputation in complicated ways. His wartime work was classified for decades after the war, and when the story was finally told, in the 1970s, it was presented as a heroic tale of British ingenuity. That tale is true, but it is incomplete: the Polish cryptographers who had broken Enigma before the war, the American contribution, and the thousands of people who operated the Bombes are often left out. Turing's role was central, but it was not solitary, and the myth of the lone codebreaker has sometimes obscured the collective nature of the work. What is not in doubt is that without Turing's methods the Battle of the Atlantic would have been far harder to win, and that his work saved lives on a scale that is difficult to measure and impossible to forget.

4. After the war: the ACE and the birth of artificial intelligence

After the war Turing designed the Automatic Computing Engine, the ACE, one of the first stored-program computers, for the National Physical Laboratory. The ACE was delayed by bureaucracy and by Turing's own impatience with administration, and it was not built in the form he designed, but its principles influenced the computers that followed. He then moved to the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester computer and on the mathematical theory of morphogenesis, the question of how patterns form in nature, work that was far ahead of its time and that has only recently been appreciated. He was, in these years, one of the most creative scientists in Britain, working across computing, biology and philosophy.

In 1950 he published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the paper that proposed the imitation game, now known as the Turing test. The test asks whether a machine can imitate a human in conversation well enough to fool a judge, and Turing argued that if a machine could do so, it would be reasonable to say that it could think. He devoted a section of the paper to answering Ada Lovelace's objection, that machines can only do what they are ordered to do and cannot originate anything, arguing that machines might learn and might surprise us. The paper is still the reference point for debates about machine intelligence, and it is read today not only by computer scientists but by philosophers, because it asks the question that still divides the field: what is thinking, and can a machine do it?

The tragedy of Turing's post-war career is that it was cut short just as it was reaching its height. He was 38 when he published the 1950 paper, and he had decades of work ahead of him. His move to Manchester, his work on morphogenesis, and his thinking about machine learning all pointed towards a career that would have been as influential as his wartime work. Instead, within two years he was prosecuted, and within four he was dead. The loss to science is incalculable, not because of what he had already done, which was enough for any lifetime, but because of what he would have done next. Stephen Hawking, who worked in the same Cambridge tradition, lived to see his ideas tested and debated; Turing did not, and his later ideas had to wait decades for others to rediscover them.

5. Prosecution, chemical castration and death

In 1952 Turing was convicted of gross indecency for a homosexual relationship, which was then a crime in Britain. He was given the choice of prison or chemical castration, treatment with female hormones intended to reduce his libido, and he chose the treatment. The hormones caused him to grow breasts and made him impotent, and they are believed to have affected his mood and his work. He lost his security clearance, which ended his work for the government, and he was placed under surveillance. He continued to work at Manchester, but his position was diminished, and he was, in the words of his biographer, a broken man in some respects and a defiant one in others.

He died on 7 June 1954 in Wilmslow, Cheshire, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning. A half-eaten apple was found beside his bed, and the inquest recorded suicide. The verdict has been questioned by some biographers, who have suggested that the cyanide may have come from an accident in his home laboratory, where he kept chemicals for gold-plating, and that the apple may have been a coincidence. The official finding remains suicide, and most historians accept it, while noting that the circumstances are not entirely clear. What is clear is that a man who had saved his country was driven to despair by its laws, and that the state that had relied on him in wartime had, in peacetime, treated him as a criminal.

The comparison with other scientists of his generation is stark. Albert Einstein died in his bed, honoured and free, at 76. Isaac Newton died a national hero, at 84. Turing died at 41, a convicted criminal, his work secret, his name unknown to the public. The difference was not talent but the law: homosexuality was a crime in Britain until 1967, and Turing was one of thousands of men prosecuted under laws that are now regarded as shameful. His case is the most famous, because his contribution was the greatest, but it was not unique, and the campaign for his pardon was, in part, a campaign for all of them.

6. Pardon, rehabilitation and the 50-pound note

Turing's rehabilitation took decades. His wartime work was declassified in the 1970s, and his reputation grew as the story of Bletchley Park became known. In 2009 the British prime minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology for the way Turing had been treated, calling it appalling. In 2013 Turing received a royal pardon, an exceptional honour, and in 2017 the Alan Turing law pardoned thousands of other men convicted under the same laws, extending the justice done to Turing to those who had suffered with him. In 2019 the Bank of England announced that Turing would appear on the 50-pound note, and the note was issued in 2021, making him the first openly gay person to appear on a British banknote.

The pardon has been debated, and the debate is worth understanding. Some argued that a pardon implied that Turing had done something wrong and needed forgiveness, and that what was needed was not a pardon but an acknowledgement that the law itself was wrong. Others argued that the pardon was a necessary symbol, and that its extension to thousands of others through the Alan Turing law made it more than symbolic. The debate reflects a larger question about how societies atone for past injustice: whether to pardon the victims, to apologise to them, or to change the law and move on. Britain did all three, in stages, and Turing's case was the catalyst for each of them.

There is also a question about whether the rehabilitation has gone too far in the other direction, turning Turing into a saint and a symbol, and obscuring the difficult, awkward man he was. He was, by all accounts, eccentric, blunt and sometimes hard to work with, and his genius did not make him easy. The films and books about him have sometimes simplified his story into a tale of a misunderstood genius destroyed by a cruel society, which is true in outline but misses the texture of his life. A fuller account does not diminish him; it makes him human, and it makes the injustice done to him more, not less, shocking, because it was done to a real person, not to a symbol.

7. Legacy: the father of computing and the question he left us

Turing is regarded as the father of computer science and a founder of artificial intelligence. The Turing machine remains the standard model of computation, the Turing test remains the reference point for debates about machine intelligence, and the Turing Award, given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery, is the highest honour in computer science, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. His wartime work is credited with shortening the Second World War, and his post-war work on morphogenesis and machine learning anticipated fields that are now central to science. No other figure in computing has his range: theory, codebreaking, machine design, artificial intelligence and biology, all in a career of less than twenty years.

His legacy also includes the question he posed in 1950, which is now the central question of the age of artificial intelligence: can machines think, and if they can, what does that mean for us? Every discussion of chatbots, of machine creativity, of whether computers will replace human workers, is a discussion that Turing framed, and his paper is still the starting point for those who argue on either side. The fact that a man writing in 1950, before any computer could hold a conversation, asked the question that still divides the field is a measure of his foresight, and it is why his work is read by philosophers as well as by engineers.

For readers who want to go further, the best starting point is Turing's own writing, above all the 1936 paper and the 1950 paper, both of which are available online and both of which are more readable than their reputation suggests. Andrew Hodges's biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma, is the definitive account of his life, and the Bletchley Park museum tells the story of his wartime work. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; his papers give his mind, and they are the reason he is still argued about, and still read, more than seventy years after his death. His life is a reminder that the greatest contributions to science can come from people whom society treats as outsiders, and that a society that punishes its geniuses punishes itself.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alan Turing
• Wikipedia — Alan Turing
• Bank of England — The new £50 note unveiled (Alan Turing)
• Bletchley Park — The First Huts (Hut 8 and Turing)

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• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.