I · The foundations

Alan Turing

1912–1954

Mathematician · Government Code & Cypher School · NPL · Manchester

Gave us

The Turing machine. Computability. The Turing test. The architectural model of the stored-program computer (ACE).

The story

His 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers" defined what computation IS. He spent the war breaking Enigma at Bletchley. Persecuted for being gay; pardoned posthumously in 2013.

"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."

More from The foundations

Claude Shannon Mathematician at Bell Labs · MIT John von Neumann Mathematician · Institute for Advanced Study · Manhattan Project Edsger W. Dijkstra Computer scientist · TU Eindhoven · UT Austin Donald Knuth Stanford emeritus · author of The Art of Computer Programming Leslie Lamport Microsoft Research · ex-DEC SRC · 2013 Turing laureate

Across the field

II Ken Thompson Bell Labs · Google · co-creator of Unix · co-creator of Go II Bjarne Stroustrup Morgan Stanley · ex-Bell Labs · creator of C++ II Guido van Rossum Microsoft · ex-Dropbox · ex-Google · creator of Python II Anders Hejlsberg Microsoft technical fellow · creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript II Graydon Hoare Independent · ex-Mozilla · creator of Rust III Tim Berners-Lee CERN · W3C · Inrupt · creator of the World Wide Web III Vint Cerf Google chief internet evangelist · co-creator of TCP/IP III Paul Mockapetris Inventor of DNS · USC ISI

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