The Code Breaker: Alan Turing who saved million lives

Jayandhan R 🧩
4 min readFeb 22, 2023

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Alan Turing at age 16

Alan Turing is a renowned mathematician and computer scientist.He is considered one of the greatest cryptographers of the 20th century. Alan Turing was born in 1912 in London, England.

He studied mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge and later made important contributions to the field of computer theory.

Alan Turing king’s College Cambridge

During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, a British code-breaking center, to break the German Enigma cipher.

If the Germans had cracked the Enigma code, the war would have been saved by several years.

Enigma Machine

Enigma Machine

This Enigma machine is made in Germany by the manufacturer Ertel-Werk. This machine was invented in 1918 to secure bank communications. Because it was battery powered and portable, it was taken by the Germans to encrypt and decrypt messages and messages.

Working of Enigma Machine : Click here

Founder of modern computing

Alan Turing, the creator of modern computing, essentially came up with the idea of computer memory in 1936.

He published an article called “On Computable Numbers” talking about the obsolescence of computers.

Bombe — Machine Decrypts German’s Encrypted messages

Turing’s work in breaking the Enigma cipher was one of the most important achievements of World War II.

He and his team at Bletchley Park developed a machine called the “Bomb” used to automate the process of deciphering German messages.

The codebreaker’s success at Bletchley Park was a closely guarded secret, which became known within a few years.

It is known as a Turing machine which is regarded as a theoretical model of a computer.

Alan Turing’s main hypotheses in the paper were that in the future, humans would be able to build machines which compute any problem, using 0s and 1s.

The information Alan Turing published about using single machines to carry out several tasks and memory storage was used as the foundation used to build the digital computer.

The Imitation Game flim delivers the true story of this great mathematician Alan Turing and his acts. click here for the movie trailer.

The father of modern computer science

When Alan Turing was working for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory in 1945, he designed the Automatic Computing Machine.

The machine was able to electronically store programs. Previously, computers did not have electronic memory storage capability, meaning computers had to be manually wired to switch between programs.

He is also credited with being one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence.

In 1952, Turing was charged with homosexuality, which was then a crime in Britain. He was given the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration, and he chose the latter. He committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954.

The Alan Turing Memorial, situated in Sackville Gardens in Manchester, England, is a sculpture in memory of Alan Turing.

Turing’s legacy, however, lives on. His contributions to computing and code-breaking have had a great impact on modern technology, and he is celebrated as a hero and icon for the LGBTQ+ community.

In 2009, the British government formally apologized for his treatment, and in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon.

Hope you guys enjoyed the story 🤗🤗🤗 See y’all in next blog…Bye!

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Jayandhan R 🧩

Cyber Security Enthusiast and Learner, spreading awareness abt cyber threats in all possible platforms ✨️