Wolfram alpha lambda calculus1/15/2024 ![]() Turing’s greatest achievement was undoubtedly his construction in 1936 of a universal Turing machine-a theoretical device intended to represent the mechanization of mathematical processes. And indeed, 35 years ago, Alan Turing and his work were little known, and it is only fairly recently that Turing has become as famous as he is today. But even though my teacher knew my interest in computers, he never mentioned Turing or his work to me. Recently I even found out that Turing had written about the “reform of mathematical notation and phraseology”-a topic of great interest to me in connection with both Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha.Īnd at some point I learned that a high school math teacher of mine (Norman Routledge) had been a friend of Turing’s late in his life. (Earlier he had also designed a gear-based machine for doing this.) In the early 1980s, for example, I had become very interested in theories of biological growth-only to find (from Sara Turing’s book) that Alan Turing had done all sorts of largely unpublished work on that.Īnd for example in 1989, when we were promoting an early version of Mathematica, I decided to make a poster of the Riemann zeta function-only to discover that Alan Turing had at one time held the record for computing zeros of the zeta function. ![]() And over the 30 years that have followed, I have kept on running into Alan Turing, often in unexpected places. But I have a distinct memory from around 1979 of going to the library, and finding a little book about Alan Turing written by his mother, Sara Turing.Īnd gradually I built up quite a picture of Alan Turing and his work. Probably it was when I decided to learn all I could about computer science-and saw all sorts of mentions of “ Turing machines”. I’m not sure where I next encountered Alan Turing. So I asked around, and started hearing that perhaps Turing had invented codes that were still being used. At the time, at least some of the British wartime cryptography effort was still secret, including Turing’s role in it. And I heard it claimed that after the war, he had been killed by British Intelligence. I heard that he had done mysterious but important work in breaking German codes during the war. And presumably it was at Bletchley Park that he had met Alan Turing.Ī few years later, I heard scattered mentions of Alan Turing in various British academic circles. In a very British way, the classics professor wanted to tell me something about it, without breaking any secrets. Only years later did I realize that “Ultra” was the codename for the British cryptanalysis effort at Bletchley Park during the war. ![]() At the time, I didn’t think much of it-though I did remember it. One of the classics professor’s eccentricities was that whenever the word “ultra” came up in a Latin text, he would repeat it over and over again, and make comments about remembering it. Through a friend of my parents, I had gotten to know a rather eccentric old classics professor, who, knowing my interest in science, mentioned to me this “bright young chap named Turing” whom he had known during the Second World War. I think I first heard about Alan Turing when I was about eleven years old, right around the time I saw my first computer. But somehow I feel I know him well-not least because many of my own intellectual interests have had an almost eerie parallel with his.Īnd by a strange coincidence, Mathematica‘s “birthday” (June 23, 1988) is aligned with Turing’s-so that today is also the celebration of Mathematica‘s 22 nd birthday. I never met Alan Turing he died five years before I was born. Today (June 23, 2010) would have been Alan Turing‘s 98 th birthday-if he had not died in 1954, at the age of 41.
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