Alan Turing and the Universal Machine

Alan Turing with the Universal Machine at Bletchley Park. He saved lives estimated to fourteen(14,000,000) million during the World War II, for his crucial role in finding numerous techniques to speed up the breaking of the German Eningma Code.

Turing's timeline

  • 23rdJune 1912 - Born in Maida Vale, London, England
  • January 1922-1926 - Attended Hazelhurst Preparatory School
  • 1926 - He went on to Sherborne School
  • 1927 - Continued solving advanced problems without even studying Elementary Calculus
  • 1928 - Managed to make Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion which was in a text conclusive and clear
  • 1931-1934 - Studied as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge and attained first-class honours in mathematics
  • 1935 - Became a Fellow of King's College after proving the 'the central limit theorem' which was unknown to the committee
  • 1936 - Published his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
  • September 1936-July 1938 - Studied cryptology while at Princeton University, built three of the stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. He obtained his PHD from the Department of Mathematics
  • September 1938 - Worked part-time with the Government Code and Cypher School
  • 1939 - Turing and Knox developed a broader approach for decrypting the Eningma Machine's messages using the crib-based decryption
  • 1941 - Turing proposed marriage to Hut 8 colleague Joan Clarke
  • 1946 - Turing was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire
  • 1951 - He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society
  • 7th June 1954 - Died in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England from Cyanide poisoning
  • 1994 - The Manchester city intermediate ring road was named "Alan Turing Way"
  • 23rd June 2001 - A statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester in Sackville Park
  • 10th September 2009 - The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, released a statement apologising and describing the treatment of Turing as "appalling"
  • 23 June 2012 - On his birth date, a blue statue at the college was unveiled

You needed exceptional talent, you needed genius at Bletchley and Turing's was that genius. said Asa Briggs