CHAPTER 1

Life and work

jack copeland and jonathan bowen

A

few months after Alan Turing’s tragically early death, in 1954, his colleague Geoffrey

Jefferson (professor of neurosurgery at Manchester University) wrote what might

serve as Turing’s epitaph:^1

Alan in whom the lamp of genius burned so bright—too hot a flame perhaps it

was for his endurance. He was so unversed in worldly ways, so childlike it some-

times seemed to me, so unconventional, so non-conform[ing] to the general

pattern. His genius flared because he had never quite grown up, he was I sup-

pose a sort of scientific Shelley.

The genius who died at 41

After his short but brilliant career Alan Mathison Turing’s life ended 15 days short of his forty-

second birthday.^2 His ideas lived on, however, and at the turn of the millennium Time magazine

listed him among the twentieth-century’s one hundred greatest minds, alongside the Wright

brothers, Albert Einstein, DNA busters Crick and Watson, and Alexander Fleming, the discov-

erer of penicillin.^3

Turing’s achievements during his short lifetime were legion. Best known as the mathemati-

cian who broke some of Nazi Germany’s most secret codes, Turing was also one of the ringlead-

ers of the computer revolution. Today, all who click, tap, or touch to open are familiar with the

impact of his ideas. We take for granted that we use the same slab of hardware to shop, manage

our finances, type our memoirs, play our favourite music and videos, and send instant messages

across the street or around the world. In an era when ‘computer’ was the term for a human clerk

who did the sums in the back office of an insurance company or science lab, Turing envisaged

a ‘universal computing machine’, able to do anything that a programmer could pin down in

the form of a series of instructions. He could not have foreseen this at the time, but his uni-

versal computing machine changed the way we live: it eventually caught on like wildfire, with

sales of personal computers now hovering around the million a day mark. Turing’s universal

machine transported us into a world where many young people have never known life without

the Internet.