Person

Alan Turing

Portrait of Alan Turing
Portrait of Alan Turing

Defined computability with a thought experiment that became the blueprint for every computer since, then led the codebreaking of the German naval Enigma at Bletchley. His 1950 paper asked whether machines can think; we are still answering.

Photo: Possibly Arthur Reginald Chaffin (1893-1954), via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

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