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His parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a day school, at the age of six. The headmistress recognized his genius early on, as did many of his subsequent educators. In 1926, at the age of 14, he went on to Sherborne School in Dorset. His first day of term coincided with General Strike in England, but so determined was he to attend his first day that he rode his bike unaccompanied more than 60 miles from Southampton to school, stopping overnight at an inn.
Turing's natural inclination toward mathematics and science did not earn him
respect with the teachers at Sherborne, a famous and expensive
public school, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on
the
classics. His headmaster wrote to his
parents: "I hope he will not fall between two schools. 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".
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Turing's unwillingness to work as hard on his classical studies as on science
and mathematics meant he failed to win a scholarship to
Trinity College, Cambridge, and went on to the college of his second
choice,
King's College, Cambridge.
Turing was an undergraduate at King's College from 1931 to 1934,
graduating with a distinguished degree, and in 1935 was elected a fellow at
King's on the strength of a dissertation on the
central limit theorem. In his momentous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (submitted on 28 May 1936), Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called Turing machines, formal and simple devices. He proved that such a machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical problem if it were representable as an algorithm, even if no actual Turing machine would be likely to have practical applications, being much slower than alternatives. Bletchley Park  Turing machines are to this day the central object of study in theory of computation. He went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide, in general, algorithmically whether a given Turing machine will ever halt. While his proof was published subsequent to Alonzo Church's equivalent proof in respect to his lambda calculus, Turing's work is considerably more accessible and intuitive. It was also novel in its notion of a "Universal (Turing) Machine", the idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other machine. The paper also introduces the notion of definable numbers. During the Second World War, Turing was a main participant in the efforts at Bletchley Park to break German ciphers. Building on cryptanalysis work carried out in Poland before the war, he contributed several insights into breaking both the Enigma machine and the Lorenz SZ 40/42 (a teletype cipher attachment codenamed "Tunny" by the British), and was, for a time, head of Hut 8, the section responsible for reading German naval signals. Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had designed an electromechanical machine which could help break Enigma: the bombe, named after and building upon the original Polish-designed bomba. They were also referred to as "Bronze Goddesses" because their cases were made of bronze, but they were more prosaically described by operators as being "like great big metal bookcases". The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, became one of the primary tools, and the major automated one, used to attack Enigma-protected message traffic. |
