Alan Turing

Honouring Alan Turing

We honour Alan Turing, mathematician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst. Until his work on decrypting the German Enigma machine during the 2nd World War was made public, he was primarily known in computer science for his papers on computability, specifically for Turing Machines, a conceptually simple machine with a tape reader/writer that he showed was capable of computing anything computable.

Additionally, on computability, he worked on the halting problem, demonstrating the impossibility of writing an algorithm that could determine whether another computer program would halt or not. His work on Enigma was dramatised in the movie “The Imitation Game”. The title alludes to his test for artificial intelligence, the Turing Test.