Who was Alan Turing?
Alan Turing may very well be the best known mathematician of the 20th century. This may be due to the movies that were made about him, plus additional videos you can see on YouTube, and numerous references on the internet.
The greatest accomplishment in mathematics in the 20th century was Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and that was due to another great mathematician, Kurt Gödel. But, the Turing Machine which was described by Alan Turing in a paper he wrote in 1936 may very well be the second greatest.
Alan Turing made several significant contributions in the field of mathematics, but he is best remembered for the following three major accomplishments:
1. The paper that he wrote entitled "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" in which he introduced something that later became commonly known as the Turing Machine.
2. His work during World War II whereby he successfully cracked the German Enigma code.
3. A test he proposed as a way to determine whether computers have reached the level of intelligence equal to that of humans. He called it the "Imitation Game", but today it is better known as the "Turing Test".
Version 1.0 -- April 23, 2017