COPElAND & BOwEN | 7
1934 Passes his final Cambridge exams with flying colours: first-class honours with
distinction, or ‘B Star wrangler’ in Cambridge parlance.
1935 Elected a Fellow of King’s College at the very young age of 22.
Attends Max Newman’s lectures on the foundations of mathematics.
Is inspired to invent the universal Turing machine.1936 Completes and publishes his famous paper ‘On computable numbers, with an
application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, laying the foundations for modern
computer science.Travels to the United States to study for a PhD at Princeton University
under Alonzo Church. Works on designing ciphers in his spare time.1937 Studies what mathematicians call ‘intuition’.
Investigates a possible way of circumventing Kurt Gödel’s famous
incompleteness theorem.Plays hockey and tennis.
1938 Finishes his PhD thesis ‘Systems of logic based on ordinals’.
Builds an electrical cipher machine.
Leaves Princeton for Cambridge as war approaches. Resumes life at King’s.
1939 Gives a course of lectures on mathematical logic.
Attends classes on the foundations of mathematics taught by the eccentric
Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.Begins work on a German cipher machine called ‘Enigma’. Pays regular visits
to veteran codebreaker Dilly Knox at the Government Code and Cypher
School (GC&CS) in London.Writes his paper ‘A method for the calculation of the zeta-function’. Builds
a mechanical analogue computer for calculating the zeta-function; pieces of
the machinery hang about in attics for many years afterwards.War with Germany declared on 3 September. Turing reports to the wartime
headquarters of GC&CS at Bletchley Park (aka ‘Station X’). Works in
Knox’s ‘Research Section’.