The Human Factor - Alan Turing

In 2012, it was a special year for all mathematicians, scientists and computer scientists as it marked 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing. He was born in 2012 and sadly committed suicide in 1954 by poisoning an apple for not being accepted and in fact given medication to change from being gay.

Alan Turing was perhaps one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century. Turing was a Pioneer of computer science. He is mostly known today for breaking the German enigma code for the second world war. At that time he was already established as an incredible mathematician.
Touring concede of a hypothetical machine that reads symbols on a strip of tape, rewriting them or deleting them based on a finite set of rules. In fact originally he described a person performing these operations a computer. Given a problem to compute this machine would either stop and give you the answer or run forever if the answer doesn't exist.
The imagined touring machine model went to become one of the corner stones of computer science, and Touring was only 22.

During the second world war, the Germans used a machine called enigma to encrypt their secret message about the size of a type writer, the enigma has a second set of letters that light up called the lab board. If you press a letter on the keyboard, the machine generated a different letter to represent it on the lab board creating the code. The standard enigma machine had over 150 million, million, million possible codes(150,000000,000000,000000). This is that the system changes pressing the same letter to becoming a different result. Double letters for example, may not become double letters in the code.
Turing was one of the code crackers during the second world war and helped code many messages. They say that without these coders, the war could have gone as long as 2 years longer. They technically saved many lives by discovering secret messages of times, places, methods of destruction and so on. Along with Gordon Welshman, he designed a machine to smash the German enigma code, called the bomb. This was all done with coding which shows how he was to vital to today's computers and technology of communication.