alan mathison turing

English - English

Definition of alan mathison turing in English English dictionary

born June 23, 1912, London, Eng. died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire English mathematician and logician. He studied at the Universityof Cambridge and at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. In his seminal 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers," he proved that there cannot exist any universal algorithmic method of determining truth in mathematics and that mathematics will always contain undecidable (as opposed to unknown) propositions. That paper also introduced the Turing machine. He believed that computers eventually would be capable of thought indistinguishable from that of a human and proposed a simple test (see Turing test) to assess this capability. His papers on the subject are widely acknowledged as the foundation of research in artificial intelligence. He did valuable work in cryptography during World War II; after the war he taught at the University of Manchester. His apparent suicide at 41 followed an arrest for homosexual acts and extreme medical treatments aimed at changing his sexual orientation

Related Terms

Alan Turing

{i} (1912-1954) British mathematician and inventor of a mathematical model for computer technology, cryptographer who helped decipher the code of the Nazi "Enigma" system during WW II

Alan Turing

a British mathematician and computer scientist, who developed ideas which were later used to build the first electronic computer, and which also influenced the development of the study of artificial intelligence. During World War II he helped to find out the meaning of the German military codes (=secret writing system used for sending messages) (1912-54). born June 23, 1912, London, Eng. died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire English mathematician and logician. He studied at the Universityof Cambridge and at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. In his seminal 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers," he proved that there cannot exist any universal algorithmic method of determining truth in mathematics and that mathematics will always contain undecidable (as opposed to unknown) propositions. That paper also introduced the Turing machine. He believed that computers eventually would be capable of thought indistinguishable from that of a human and proposed a simple test (see Turing test) to assess this capability. His papers on the subject are widely acknowledged as the foundation of research in artificial intelligence. He did valuable work in cryptography during World War II; after the war he taught at the University of Manchester. His apparent suicide at 41 followed an arrest for homosexual acts and extreme medical treatments aimed at changing his sexual orientation

Hyphenation

Al·an mathison turing

Turkish pronunciation

älın mäthîsın tûrîng

Pronunciation

/ˈalən ˈmaᴛʜəsən ˈto͝orəɴɢ/ /ˈælən ˈmæθɪsən ˈtʊrɪŋ/