Samson Abramsky, Oxford University, gives a talk for the Alan Turing Centenary weekend.  Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Turing in the History of Software

Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June, 1912 - exactly one hundred years before this weekend meeting which celebrates his life and achievements. Although most well-known for his work at Bletchley Park in the pioneering days which saw the birth of modern practical computing; Turing had achieved fame well before the second world war, with a seminal account of theoretical computation and his solution to the Entscheidungs problem. An Olympic-class marathon runner, whose refusal to conform to the narrow sexual standards of the day led to persecution and an early death - Turing did fundamental research on Artificial Intelligence, Computer Programming and even Mathematical Biology. This weekend attempts a rounded view of a polymath, one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century, his life and his times.