Timeline Sunday 23 June 1912

Events on Sunday 23 June 1912 2

• 1912 – 1954 Alan Turing The man who defined the machine Alan Turing answered a question in mathematical logic in 1936 and, in the course of answering it, invented the idea of a general-purpose computer. He spent the war at Bletchley Park breaking German naval Enigma, work that is credited with shortening it by years. He then built early computers, asked whether machines could think, and turned to the mathematics of how a tiger gets its stripes. In 1952 he was prosecuted for a consensual relationship with a man, chemically castrated as an alternative to prison, and stripped of his security clearance. He died two years later at forty-one.
• 1912 Alan Turing born in Maida Vale A father in the Indian Civil Service Alan Mathison Turing is born in London while his parents are on leave from India. He and his brother are largely raised by family friends in Hastings while their father continues his posting. The separation is unremarkable for his class and era and leaves him, by most accounts, self-contained from very early on.