Page 18 - Great Elizabethans

Sometimes called “the father of computer science”, Alan Turing was a brilliant thinker whose ideas helped shape the development of computers and artificial intelligence. He’s also remembered for his amazing work as a code-breaker during the Second World War.
THINKING DIFFERENTLY
Alan Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912. Throughout his childhood, Alan and his older brother, John, rarely saw their parents – his father was working for the British government in India, so the boys lived with foster parents in the seaside town of Hastings.
It was clear that young Alan was a deep, unusual thinker. As a child, he was particularly inspired by a book called Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know, filled with descriptions of how chicks grow and why moths fly towards light. He went to school in Hastings at first, then to a boarding school in
Sussex. Some of his teachers were impressed by his intelligence, but others thought he was
dreamy and untidy – and things got worse when he started at Sherborne School in Dorset, aged 13.
At Sherborne, his teachers told him off for “slipshod, dirty work”, and nearly stopped him taking School Certificate exams
(now GCSEs). The headmaster called him “the sort of
boy who is bound to be a problem for any school” – not
because Alan was naughty or rebellious, but because he thought about things in a different way.
There was a general strike on Alan’s first day at Sherborne School, which meant no trains were running. He was so determined to get to school on time that he cycled 63 miles!
But despite this, Alan kept his enthusiasm for science
and mathematics. When he was a Sixth Form student, he met
Christopher Morcom, another sixth-former who loved science.
Christopher was special to Alan – they studied together and both applied to
Cambridge University. Then Christopher suddenly died of tuberculosis in 1930. Alan
was heartbroken, but felt that he should carry on doing the things Christopher could no longer do. So he accepted a scholarship
to study mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge. Here Alan’s talent was recognised at last. Aged only
22, he was made a Fellow of the college in 1935, and in 1936 he published a paper called “On Computable Numbers”, which laid down the theory of how to program a computer – before
computers (as we know them today) even existed.
This impressed everyone, and Alan was invited to study
at Princeton University, in the United States.
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