The recent movie “The Imitation Game” gave [Alan Turing] some well-deserved fame among non-computer types (although the historical accuracy of that movie is poor, at best; there have been several ...

The history of digital computing can be divided into an old testament and a new testament. The prophets of the old testament, led by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 1670s, supplied the logic; those ...

While the invention of calculus by Newton and Leibniz in the 17th century set the stage for the so-called industrial revolution and unleashed unparalleled analytical power to fast-track human ...

The British mathematician and pioneer of computing Alan Turing published a paper in 1936 which described a Universal Machine, a theoretical model of a computer processor that would later become known ...

As a practising computer scientist, I thought I had a fairly good grasp of Alan Turing’s many contributions to the field. But The Turing Guide, by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak and Robin ...

Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept. It's hard to overestimate Alan Turing ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Chillin' with my children in London recently, ...