User:سائغ/E1

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Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius that he was later to display prominently.[1] His parents purchased a house in Guildford in 1927, and Turing lived there during school holidays. The location is also marked with a blue plaque.[2]

School[edit]

Turing's parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a primary school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, from the age of six to nine. The headmistress recognised his talent, noting that she has "...had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius."[3]

Between January 1922 and 1926, Turing was educated at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, an independent school in the village of Frant in Sussex (now East Sussex).[4] In 1926, at the age of 13, he went on to Sherborne School,[5] a boarding independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset, where he boarded at Westcott House. The first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike, in Britain, but Turing was so determined to attend, that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to Sherborne, stopping overnight at an inn.[6]

Turing's natural inclination towards mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on the classics. His headmaster wrote to his parents: "I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school".[7] Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having studied even elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but it is possible that he managed to deduce Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.[8]

Christopher Morcom[edit]

At Sherborne, Turing formed a significant friendship with fellow pupil Christopher Collan Morcom (13 July 1911 – 13 February 1930),[9] who has been described as Turing's "first love". Their relationship provided inspiration in Turing's future endeavours, but it was cut short by Morcom's death, in February 1930, from complications of bovine tuberculosis, contracted after drinking infected cow's milk some years previously.[10][11][12]

The event caused Turing great sorrow. He coped with his grief by working that much harder on the topics of science and mathematics that he had shared with Morcom. In a letter to Morcom's mother, Frances Isobel Morcom (née Swan), Turing wrote:

I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little the same about me ... I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do.[13]

Turing's relationship with Morcom's mother continued long after Morcom's death, with her sending gifts to Turing, and him sending letters, typically on Morcom's birthday.[14] A day before the third anniversary of Morcom's death (13 February 1933), he wrote to Mrs. Morcom:

I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this letter is just to tell you that I shall be thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here. Your affectionate Alan.[15]

Some have speculated that Morcom's death was the cause of Turing's atheism and materialism.[16] Apparently, at this point in his life he still believed in such concepts as a spirit, independent of the body and surviving death. In a later letter, also written to Morcom's mother, Turing wrote:

Personally, I believe that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not by the same kind of body ... as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body can hold on to a 'spirit', whilst the body is alive and awake the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies, the 'mechanism' of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately.[17][18]

University and work on computability[edit]

After Sherborne, Turing studied as an undergraduate from 1931 to 1934 at King's College, Cambridge,[19] where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. In 1935, at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow of King's College on the strength of a dissertation in which he proved the central limit theorem.[20] Unknown to the committee, the theorem had already been proven, in 1922, by Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg.[21]

In 1936, Turing published his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem".[22] It was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society journal in two parts, the first on 30 November and the second on 23 December.[23] In this paper, Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and simple hypothetical devices that became known as Turing machines. The Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) was originally posed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1928. Turing proved that his "universal computing machine" would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. He went on to prove that there was no solution to the decision problem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever halt. This paper has been called "easily the most influential math paper in history".[24]

King's College, Cambridge, where Turing was an undergraduate in 1931 and became a Fellow in 1935. The computer room is named after him.

Although Turing's proof was published shortly after Alonzo Church's equivalent proof using his lambda calculus,[25] Turing's approach is considerably more accessible and intuitive than Church's.[26] It also included a notion of a 'Universal Machine' (now known as a universal Turing machine), with the idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other computation machine (as indeed could Church's lambda calculus). According to the Church–Turing thesis, Turing machines and the lambda calculus are capable of computing anything that is computable. John von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing's paper.[27] To this day, Turing machines are a central object of study in theory of computation.

From September 1936 to July 1938, Turing spent most of his time studying under Church at Princeton University,[28] in the second year as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier.[29] In June 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton;[30] his dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,[31][32] introduced the concept of ordinal logic and the notion of relative computing, in which Turing machines are augmented with so-called oracles, allowing the study of problems that cannot be solved by Turing machines. John von Neumann wanted to hire him as his postdoctoral assistant, but he went back to the United Kingdom.[33]

  1. ^ Jones, G. James (11 December 2001). "Alan Turing – Towards a Digital Mind: Part 1". System Toolbox. Archived from the original on 3 August 2007. Retrieved 27 July 2007.
  2. ^ "Guildford Dragon NEWS". The Guildford Dragon. 29 November 2012. Archived from the original on 19 October 2013. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  3. ^ Cawthorne, Nigel (2014). Alan Turing : the enigma man. London. p. 18. ISBN 978-1-78404-535-7. OCLC 890938716.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ^ Alan Mathison (April 2016). "Alan Turing Archive – Sherborne School (ARCHON CODE: GB1949)" (PDF). Sherborne School, Dorset. Archived (PDF) from the original on 26 December 2016. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  5. ^ "Alan Turing OBE, PhD, FRS (1912–1954)". The Old Shirburnian Society. 1 September 2016. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  6. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1985). Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. Basic Books. p. 484. ISBN 978-0-465-04566-2. OCLC 230812136.
  7. ^ Hodges 1983, p. 26
  8. ^ Hodges 1983, p. 34
  9. ^ The Shirburnian
  10. ^ Caryl, Christian (19 December 2014). "Poor Imitation of Alan Turing". New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on 7 January 2015. Retrieved 9 January 2015.
  11. ^ Rachel Hassall, 'The Sherborne Formula: The Making of Alan Turing' Archived 15 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine 'Vivat!' 2012/13
  12. ^ Teuscher, Christof, ed. (2004). Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-540-20020-8. OCLC 53434737.
  13. ^ Hodges 1983, p. 61
  14. ^ Hodges, Andrew (2012). Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton University Press. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-691-15564-7.
  15. ^ Hodges, Andrew (2012). Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton University Press. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-691-15564-7.
  16. ^ Paul Gray, Alan Turing Archived 19 January 2011 at the Wayback Machine Time Magazine's Most Important People of the Century, p. 2
  17. ^ Hodges 1983, pp. 82–83
  18. ^ The Old Shirburnian Society
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference whoswho was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ See Section 3 of John Aldrich, "England and Continental Probability in the Inter-War Years", Journal Electronique d'Histoire des Probabilités et de la Statistique, vol. 5/2 Decembre 2009 Archived 21 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine Journal Electronique d'Histoire des Probabilités et de la Statistique
  21. ^ Hodges 1983, pp. 88, 94
  22. ^ Turing 1937
  23. ^ B. Jack Copeland; Carl J. Posy; Oron Shagrir (2013). Computability: Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond. MIT Press. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-262-01899-9.
  24. ^ Avi Wigderson (2019). Mathematics and Computation. Princeton University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-691-18913-0.
  25. ^ Church 1936
  26. ^ Grime, James (February 2012). "What Did Turing Do for Us?". NRICH. University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  27. ^ "von Neumann ... firmly emphasised to me, and to others I am sure, that the fundamental conception is owing to Turing—insofar as not anticipated by Babbage, Lovelace and others." Letter by Stanley Frankel to Brian Randell, 1972, quoted in Jack Copeland (2004) The Essential Turing, p. 22.
  28. ^ Cite error: The named reference bowen19 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  29. ^ Hodges 1983, p. 138
  30. ^ Turing, A.M. (1939). "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. s2-45: 161–228. doi:10.1112/plms/s2-45.1.161. hdl:21.11116/0000-0001-91CE-3.
  31. ^ Turing, Alan (1938). Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals (PhD thesis). Princeton University. doi:10.1112/plms/s2-45.1.161. hdl:21.11116/0000-0001-91CE-3. ProQuest 301792588.
  32. ^ Turing, A.M. (1938). "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 October 2012. Retrieved 4 February 2012.
  33. ^ John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More, Norman MacRae, 1999, American Mathematical Society, Chapter 8
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