Turing's First Career:
To start off Alan's adulthood, he was a mathematician working for King's College. He spent most of his time trying to make a machine that would think and run on its own, not be human controlled. The first machine idea he came up with was a machine that would scan paper tape that had symbols on them and when the paper tape was read by the machine, it did what it was programmed to do when it came across that certain symbol. The machine did the random tasks it was programmed to do which proved that the machine could operate on its own without a human controlling or telling it what to do. He called the machine the "universal machine". He also figured out that there are such things as unsolvable math problems with his machine at the age of 23. Based on his findings, he wrote a writing called "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" which he finished in the year 1936. After he finished his writing, he moved to the U.S. and went to Princeton to learn more. While he was there, he met a man named Alonzo Church who had also written a writing on unsolvable problems, but he found that out a different way than Turing did. Turing used a theoretical machine to come to his conclusion. After he came to his conclusion, he went to the field of decrypting code and cryptography. |
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. -Alan Turing |