Yes, that’s right, 100 years ago, to the day, Alan Turing came into this world in good ol’ Blighty. He would grow up to become a British superstar of mathematics and cryptography, breaking German code during WWII. And as many cryptography machines basically were mechanical computers, Turing would turn that expertise towards impacts in the computing world as well.
Alan Turing’s work in designing a machine with a set of built-in rules that was capable of processing and manipulating data stored on a piece of tape, a device he called a “Logical Computing Machine” was a great innovation to computers. Little did he know at the time that his work on these devices would become so integral and famous that they would come to be called “Turing Machines”.
A modern homage to Turing’s machine can be found constructed from a Lego Mindstorms Nxt kit.
Unfortunately, for Alan Turing, for us all, the United Kingdom still had laws against acts of homosexuality, and so Alan Turing was arrested, found guilty of criminal acts, and forced into accepting chemical castration through treatments with female hormones as an alternative to going to prison. But the harassment combined with the forced hormonal imbalance was too much for this computing genius and war hero to take, and sadly, he took his own life by cyanide, leaving our cruel world just days before his birthday on the 7th of June, 1954.