BOwEN & COPElAND | 465
(1997) and John Casti’s The Cambridge Quintet (1998) both contained rich treatments of Turing
aimed at the popular market. Casti’s book—in which a fictional treatment of Turing is blended
with passages from the real Turing’s writings—bore the dedication:
To the memory of Alan Turing and John von Neumann, creators of the modern computer age.
On the Enigma front, Michael Smith’s 1998 Station X and Simon Singh’s 1999 The Code Book
both brought Turing’s wartime work alive for general readers. The decade came to a close with
Time magazine’s 1999 article The Great Minds of the Century: this gave Turing his due, despite
labelling him a computer scientist.^1
Turing’s three most cited papers—all heading towards 10,000 citations apiece, according to
Google Scholar^2 —were published in 1936, 1950, and 1952.^3 Each effectively founded a field,
even though this did not become clear until later. The 1936 paper gave rise to theoretical com-
puter science, while artificial intelligence stemmed from the 1950 work, and mathematical biol-
ogy from the third paper, which according to Google Scholar is the most cited of the three. If
Turing had not died so young, and so soon after two of his three most influential publications,
it seems certain that he would have gone on to produce yet more inspirational ideas.
A lasting scientific memorial to Turing, inaugurated in 1966, is the Association for Computing
Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award.^4 This award is the highest scientific honour available to a
computer scientist and is presented to at least one, and sometimes up to three, leading computer
scientists each year. Many winners of this award work or worked in areas founded by Turing,
such as artificial intelligence or formal methods (the application of mathematics to software
engineering). No fewer than 33 Turing Award winners attended the Association for Computing
Machinery’s A. M. Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco in 2012 (Fig. 42.1).
The Turing machine (see Chapter 6) is probably Turing’s most important legacy to computer
science. This has continued to play a fundamental role, not least as the measure of what is and
is not computable (see Chapters 7, 37, and 41). The Turing machine concept has also deeply
influenced cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A fundamental problem known to
figure 42.1 Winners of the A. M. Turing Award at the Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco in 2012.
Left to right (with year of award): Niklaus Wirth (1984), Edmund Clarke (2007), and Barbara Liskov (2008).
Posted to Wikimedia Commons by Dennis Hamilton, (a) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turing_Centenary_Celebration_
Wirth.jpg, (b) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turing_Centenary_Celebration_Clarke.jpg, (c) https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Turing_Centenary_Celebration_Liskov.jpg. Creative Commons Licence.
