77-464: Alan Mathison Turing ( / ˈ tj ʊər ɪ ŋ / ; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist , logician , cryptanalyst , philosopher and theoretical biologist . He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science , providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine , which can be considered
154-1211: A Canalway Cavalcade in Little Venice. Maida Vale is noted for wide tree-lined avenues, large communal gardens and red-brick mansion blocks from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras . The first mansion blocks were completed in 1897, with the arrival of the identically designed Lauderdale Mansions South , Lauderdale Mansions West and Lauderdale Mansions East in Lauderdale Road. Others followed in neighbouring streets: Elgin Mansions (Elgin Avenue) and Leith Mansions (Grantully Road) in 1900, Ashworth Mansions (Elgin Avenue and Grantully Road) and Castellain Mansions (Castellain Road) in 1902, Elgin Court (Elgin Avenue) and Carlton Mansions (Randolph Avenue) in 1902, Delaware Mansions (Delaware Road) and Biddulph Mansions (Elgin Avenue and Biddulph Road) in 1907 and Randolph Court in 1910. Among
231-522: A Hampshire landowner, whose Hampshire holdings including Widley and Wymering are commemorated in Maida Vale street names. In 1816, an Act of Parliament allowed the trustees of Sir John Frederick's estate and the Bishop of London to begin developing the area. This began in the 1820s with development along Edgware Road. The area was first named on maps as Maida Vale in 1827. John Gutch, surveyor to
308-403: A Turing machine will ever halt. This paper has been called "easily the most influential math paper in history". Although Turing's proof was published shortly after Church's equivalent proof using his lambda calculus , Turing's approach is considerably more accessible and intuitive than Church's. It also included a notion of a 'Universal Machine' (now known as a universal Turing machine ), with
385-808: A ban) was used in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher . Turing travelled to the United States in November 1942 and worked with US Navy cryptanalysts on the naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington. He also visited their Computing Machine Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio . Turing's reaction to the American bombe design was far from enthusiastic: The American Bombe programme was to produce 336 Bombes, one for each wheel order. I used to smile inwardly at
462-465: A block of flats. The pub was subsequently rebuilt and re-opened following a community campaign and planning appeals. Maida Vale has a namesake electoral ward and in the 2022 local election returned three Labour councillors for Westminster City Council. The 2011 census counted a population of 10,210 in the ward. Ethnicity-wise, 62.4% of the population were White (38% British, 3% Irish, 22% Other), 11.7% were Asian, and 7.1% were Black. Maida Vale also had
539-418: A central object of study in theory of computation . From September 1936 to July 1938, Turing spent most of his time studying under Church at Princeton University , in the second year as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow . In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier . In June 1938, he obtained his PhD from
616-428: A cryptanalyst who worked with Turing, said of his colleague: In the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off. His bicycle had a fault: the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in time to adjust
693-402: A large Arab community, who formed 9.2% of the population, and by far the most spoken foreign language was Arabic. Of the 4,480 households, the number of homes owned or privately rented were about even, with socially rented a bit less but still significant. Properties are predominantly in the flats/maisonettes/apartments category (over 90 percent of the households). The median age was 33. Being in
770-534: A little the same about me ... I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do. Turing's relationship with Morcom's mother continued long after Morcom's death, with her sending gifts to Turing, and him sending letters, typically on Morcom's birthday. A day before the third anniversary of Morcom's death (13 February 1933), he wrote to Mrs. Morcom: I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this letter
847-595: A model of a general-purpose computer . Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science. Born in London, Turing was raised in southern England . He graduated from King's College, Cambridge , and in 1938, earned a doctorate degree from Princeton University . During World War II , Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park , Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. He led Hut 8 ,
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#1732780027579924-497: A sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us. Hilton echoed similar thoughts in
1001-577: A version of the central limit theorem . It was finally accepted on 16 March 1935. By spring of that same year, Turing started his master's course (Part III)—which he completed in 1937—and, at the same time, he published his first paper, a one-page article called Equivalence of left and right almost periodicity (sent on 23 April), featured in the tenth volume of the Journal of the London Mathematical Society . Later that year, Turing
1078-600: Is a genius". Between January 1922 and 1926, Turing was educated at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, an independent school in the village of Frant in Sussex (now East Sussex ). In 1926, at the age of 13, he went on to Sherborne School , an independent boarding school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset, where he boarded at Westcott House. The first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike , in Britain, but Turing
1155-490: Is just to tell you that I shall be thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here. Your affectionate Alan. Some have speculated that Morcom's death was the cause of Turing's atheism and materialism . Apparently, at this point in his life he still believed in such concepts as a spirit, independent of the body and surviving death. In a later letter, also written to Morcom's mother, Turing wrote: Personally, I believe that spirit
1232-452: Is possible that he managed to deduce Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit. At Sherborne, Turing formed a significant friendship with fellow pupil Christopher Collan Morcom (13 July 1911 – 13 February 1930), who has been described as Turing's first love. Their relationship provided inspiration in Turing's future endeavours, but it
1309-403: Is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not by the same kind of body ... as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body can hold on to a 'spirit', whilst the body is alive and awake the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies, the 'mechanism' of the body, holding the spirit is gone and
1386-534: Is recognised more widely, with statues and many things named after him , including an annual award for computing innovation. His portrait appears on the Bank of England £50 note , first released on 23 June 2021 to coincide with his birthday. The audience vote in a 2019 BBC series named Turing the greatest person of the 20th century. Turing was born in Maida Vale , London, while his father, Julius Mathison Turing,
1463-421: Is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated . If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist , he is wasting his time at a public school". Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having studied even elementary calculus . In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein 's work; not only did he grasp it, but it
1540-833: The Battle of the Atlantic . After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory , where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine , one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948, Turing joined Max Newman 's Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester , where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology . Turing wrote on
1617-510: The City of Westminster . It consists of the area surrounding the Little Venice basin and its canals. It is known for its Regency style white stucco buildings and its canals and moored boats. The name Little Venice is applied to Maida Avenue, Warwick Crescent and Blomfield Road, and the streets in the south of Maida Vale overlooking Browning's Pool, including the section of Randolph Avenue south of Warrington Crescent. According to one story,
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#17327800275791694-470: The Department of Mathematics at Princeton; his dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals , introduced the concept of ordinal logic and the notion of relative computing , in which Turing machines are augmented with so-called oracles , allowing the study of problems that cannot be solved by Turing machines. John von Neumann wanted to hire him as his postdoctoral assistant , but he went back to
1771-618: The Edgware Road . It is part of the City of Westminster and is three miles (five kilometres) northwest of Charing Cross. It has many late Victorian and Edwardian blocks of mansion flats. The area is home to the BBC Maida Vale Studios . The name of the area is derived from a pub and an Italian battle during the Napoleonic Wars . The original pub called The Hero of Maida stood on Edgware Road near
1848-755: The Grand Union Canal . South Maida Vale, a prime residential area, also has a reputation for shops and restaurants and for the Canal Cafe Theatre , the Puppet Theatre Barge , the Waterside Café and the Warwick Castle pub. A waterbus service operates from Little Venice eastwards round Regent's Park , calling at London Zoo and on towards Camden Town . The Inland Waterways Association has hosted since 1983
1925-539: The Mathematical Tripos , with extra courses at the end of the third year, as Part III only emerged as a separate degree in 1934) from February 1931 to November 1934 at King's College, Cambridge , where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. His dissertation, On the Gaussian error function , written during his senior year and delivered in November 1934 (with a deadline date of 6 December) proved
2002-641: The Regent's Canal until it closed in 1992. In the early 19th century, its hanging board displayed the likeness of the Georgian era General Sir John Stuart , under which was the legend Sir John Stuart, the hero of Maida . General Sir John Stuart was made Count of Maida (a town in Calabria ) by King Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily after the British victory at the Battle of Maida in 1806. As
2079-477: The Turing baronets . Turing's father's civil service commission was still active during Turing's childhood years, and his parents travelled between Hastings in the United Kingdom and India, leaving their two sons to stay with a retired Army couple. At Hastings, Turing stayed at Baston Lodge , Upper Maze Hill, St Leonards-on-Sea , now marked with a blue plaque. The plaque was unveiled on 23 June 2012,
2156-514: The Bishop of London, produced a plan for the area in 1827, which roughly corresponds to current road alignments. By 1868, a stretch of Edgware Road near the area had been officially named Maida Vale. In 1960, the ownership of the area's freehold passed from the Bishop of London to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, whose function was to administer the church's assets. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Maida Vale
2233-620: The Enigma cipher machine used by Nazi Germany , together with Dilly Knox , a senior GC&CS codebreaker. Soon after the July 1939 meeting near Warsaw at which the Polish Cipher Bureau gave the British and French details of the wiring of Enigma machine's rotors and their method of decrypting Enigma machine 's messages, Turing and Knox developed a broader solution. The Polish method relied on an insecure indicator procedure that
2310-609: The Entscheidungsproblem ". It was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society journal in two parts, the first on 30 November and the second on 23 December. In this paper, Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel 's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and simple hypothetical devices that became known as Turing machines . The Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem)
2387-635: The Germans were likely to change, which they in fact did in May 1940. Turing's approach was more general, using crib-based decryption for which he produced the functional specification of the bombe (an improvement on the Polish Bomba ). On 4 September 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of GC&CS. Like all others who came to Bletchley, he
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2464-648: The ICS brought the family to British India, where his grandfather had been a general in the Bengal Army . However, both Julius and Ethel wanted their children to be brought up in Britain, so they moved to Maida Vale , London, where Alan Turing was born on 23 June 1912, as recorded by a blue plaque on the outside of the house of his birth, later the Colonnade Hotel . Turing had an elder brother, John Ferrier Turing, father of Sir John Dermot Turing , 12th Baronet of
2541-569: The Nova PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets . While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner , occasionally ran the 40 miles (64 km) to London when he was needed for meetings, and he was capable of world-class marathon standards. Turing tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team , but he was hampered by an injury. His tryout time for the marathon was only 11 minutes slower than British silver medallist Thomas Richards ' Olympic race time of 2 hours 35 minutes. He
2618-445: The Second World War, Turing was a leading participant in the breaking of German ciphers at Bletchley Park . The historian and wartime codebreaker Asa Briggs has said, "You needed exceptional talent, you needed genius at Bletchley and Turing's was that genius." From September 1938, Turing worked part-time with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the British codebreaking organisation. He concentrated on cryptanalysis of
2695-489: The United Kingdom. When Turing returned to Cambridge, he attended lectures given in 1939 by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics . The lectures have been reconstructed verbatim, including interjections from Turing and other students, from students' notes. Turing and Wittgenstein argued and disagreed, with Turing defending formalism and Wittgenstein propounding his view that mathematics does not discover any absolute truths, but rather invents them. During
2772-569: The W9 postal district. The southern part of Maida Vale, at the junction of Paddington Basin with Regent's Canal with many houseboats , is known as Little Venice. Paddington Recreation Ground is also located in Maida Vale. The area to the west of Maida Vale, is known as "Maida Hill". It is a recognised postal district bounded by the Avenues on the west, the Regent's Canal to the south, Maida Vale to
2849-620: The Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.226 via cp1108 cp1108, Varnish XID 203804915 Upstream caches: cp1108 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:47:07 GMT Maida Vale Maida Vale ( / ˈ m eɪ d ə v eɪ l / MAY -də vayl ) is an affluent residential district in West London , England, north of Paddington , southwest of St John's Wood and south of Kilburn , on
2926-413: The bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, implemented electromechanically . The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred and ruled out that setting, moving on to the next. Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail. A contradiction would occur when an enciphered letter would be turned back into
3003-500: The bombes; developing a procedure dubbed Turingery for working out the cam settings of the wheels of the Lorenz SZ 40/42 ( Tunny ) cipher machine and, towards the end of the war, the development of a portable secure voice scrambler at Hanslope Park that was codenamed Delilah . By using statistical techniques to optimise the trial of different possibilities in the code breaking process, Turing made an innovative contribution to
3080-563: The buildings of architectural interest is the Carlton Tavern , a pub on Carlton Vale . Built in 1920–1921 for Charrington Brewery , it is thought to be the work of the architect Frank J. Potter and is noted for its 1920s interiors and faience tiled exterior. The building was being considered by Historic England for Grade II listing when it was unexpectedly demolished in March 2015 by the property developer CLTX Ltd to make way for
3157-508: The centenary of Turing's birth. Very early in life, Turing's parents purchased a house in Guildford in 1927, and Turing lived there during school holidays. The location is also marked with a blue plaque. Turing's parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a primary school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea , from the age of six to nine. The headmistress recognised his talent, noting that she "...had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan
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3234-523: The chain by hand. Another of his eccentricities is that he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent it being stolen. Peter Hilton recounted his experience working with Turing in Hut 8 in his "Reminiscences of Bletchley Park" from A Century of Mathematics in America: It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with
3311-728: The chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction , first observed in the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, he was never fully recognised during his lifetime because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act . In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts . He accepted hormone treatment, a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration , as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning . An inquest determined his death as suicide , but
3388-468: The chief of the secret service reported that every possible measure was being taken. The cryptographers at Bletchley Park did not know of the Prime Minister's response, but as Milner-Barry recalled, "All that we did notice was that almost from that day the rough ways began miraculously to be made smooth." More than two hundred bombes were in operation by the end of the war. Turing decided to tackle
3465-749: The committee went so far as to say that if Turing's work had been published before Lindeberg's, it would have been "an important event in the mathematical literature of that year". Between the springs of 1935 and 1936, at the same time as Alonzo Church , Turing worked on the decidability of problems, starting from Gödel's incompleteness theorems . In mid-April 1936, Turing sent Max Newman the first draft typescript of his investigations. That same month, Church published his An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory , with similar conclusions to Turing's then-yet unpublished work. Finally, on 28 May of that year, he finished and delivered his 36-page paper for publication called " On Computable Numbers, with an Application to
3542-517: The conception of Bombe hut routine implied by this programme, but thought that no particular purpose would be served by pointing out that we would not really use them in that way. Their test (of commutators) can hardly be considered conclusive as they were not testing for the bounce with electronic stop finding devices. Nobody seems to be told about rods or offiziers or banburismus unless they are really going to do something about it. Computer scientist Too Many Requests If you report this error to
3619-408: The east and Kilburn Lane to the north. Parts of Maida Vale were also included in this. The use of the name "Maida Hill" declined, but increased again since the mid-2000s as the 414 bus route (from 2005 to 2021) gave its destination as Maida Hill, and a new Maida Hill market was introduced on the square at the junction of Elgin Avenue and Harrow Road. Maida Hill is also known as "West Kilburn", with
3696-527: The evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. Following a campaign in 2009, British prime minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology for "the appalling way [Turing] was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted a pardon in 2013. The term " Alan Turing law " is used informally to refer to a 2017 law in the UK that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. Turing left an extensive legacy in mathematics and computing which today
3773-427: The expansion of London gathered pace, the name stuck as the farmland around the pub was used for urban development in the 1820s. The area is bounded by Maida Avenue and the Regent's Canal to the south, Maida Vale Road to the north-east, Kilburn Park Road to the north-west, and Shirland Road and Blomfield Road to the south-west: an area of around one square kilometre ( 1 ⁄ 2 square mile). It makes up most of
3850-476: The first named. They emphasised how small their need was compared with the vast expenditure of men and money by the forces and compared with the level of assistance they could offer to the forces. As Andrew Hodges , biographer of Turing, later wrote, "This letter had an electric effect." Churchill wrote a memo to General Ismay , which read: "ACTION THIS DAY. Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done." On 18 November,
3927-459: The idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other computation machine (as indeed could Church's lambda calculus). According to the Church–Turing thesis , Turing machines and the lambda calculus are capable of computing anything that is computable. John von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing's paper. To this day, Turing machines are
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#17327800275794004-414: The intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence,
4081-430: The more likely settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible". ... Richard said that GCHQ had now "squeezed the juice" out of the two papers and was "happy for them to be released into the public domain". Turing had a reputation for eccentricity at Bletchley Park. He was known to his colleagues as "Prof" and his treatise on Enigma was known as the "Prof's Book". According to historian Ronald Lewin , Jack Good ,
4158-464: The naval Enigma, "though I was not sure that it would work in practice, and was not, in fact, sure until some days had actually broken". For this, he invented a measure of weight of evidence that he called the ban . Banburismus could rule out certain sequences of the Enigma rotors, substantially reducing the time needed to test settings on the bombes. Later this sequential process of accumulating sufficient weight of evidence using decibans (one tenth of
4235-557: The particularly difficult problem of cracking the German naval use of Enigma "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself". In December 1939, Turing solved the essential part of the naval indicator system, which was more complex than the indicator systems used by the other services. That same night, he also conceived of the idea of Banburismus , a sequential statistical technique (what Abraham Wald later called sequential analysis ) to assist in breaking
4312-477: The poet Robert Browning , who lived in the area from 1862 to 1887, coined the name. However, this was disputed by Lord Kinross in 1966 and by London Canals. Both assert that Lord Byron (1788–1824) humorously coined the name, which now applies more loosely to a longer reach of the canal system. Browning's Pool is named after the poet. It forms the junction of Regent's Canal and the Paddington Arm of
4389-417: The primary tools, and the major automated one, used to attack Enigma-enciphered messages. The bombe searched for possible correct settings used for an Enigma message (i.e., rotor order, rotor settings and plugboard settings) using a suitable crib : a fragment of probable plaintext . For each possible setting of the rotors (which had on the order of 10 states, or 10 states for the four-rotor U-boat variant),
4466-471: The same plaintext letter, which was impossible with the Enigma. The first bombe was installed on 18 March 1940. By late 1941, Turing and his fellow cryptanalysts Gordon Welchman , Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry were frustrated. Building on the work of the Poles , they had set up a good working system for decrypting Enigma signals, but their limited staff and bombes meant they could not translate all
4543-567: The section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Turing devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers , including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine . He played a crucial role in cracking intercepted messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many engagements, including
4620-406: The signals. In the summer, they had considerable success, and shipping losses had fallen to under 100,000 tons a month; however, they badly needed more resources to keep abreast of German adjustments. They had tried to get more people and fund more bombes through the proper channels, but had failed. On 28 October they wrote directly to Winston Churchill explaining their difficulties, with Turing as
4697-464: The spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately. After graduating from Sherborne, Turing applied for several Cambridge colleges scholarships, including Trinity and King's , eventually earning an £80 per annum scholarship (equivalent to about £4,300 as of 2023) to study at the latter. There, Turing studied the undergraduate course in Schedule B (that is, a three-year Parts I and II, of
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#17327800275794774-492: The subject. He wrote two papers discussing mathematical approaches, titled The Applications of Probability to Cryptography and Paper on Statistics of Repetitions , which were of such value to GC&CS and its successor GCHQ that they were not released to the UK National Archives until April 2012, shortly before the centenary of his birth. A GCHQ mathematician, "who identified himself only as Richard," said at
4851-481: The time that the fact that the contents had been restricted under the Official Secrets Act for some 70 years demonstrated their importance, and their relevance to post-war cryptanalysis: [He] said the fact that the contents had been restricted "shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject". ... The papers detailed using "mathematical analysis to try and determine which are
4928-656: The two names being used interchangeably. Just to the east of Maida Vale is St John's Wood , with Lord's Cricket Ground . The area was originally owned by the Church, initially as part of St Margaret's, Westminster , then later by the Bishop of London after the Dissolution of the Monasteries . In 1742, a lease for future development was signed by Sir John Frederick. His daughter later married Robert Thistlethwaite,
5005-471: The war. However, official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives. At the end of the war, a memo was sent to all those who had worked at Bletchley Park, reminding them that the code of silence dictated by the Official Secrets Act did not end with the war but would continue indefinitely. Thus, even though Turing
5082-647: Was Ethel Sara Turing ( née Stoney ), daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, chief engineer of the Madras Railways . The Stoneys were a Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry family from both County Tipperary and County Longford , while Ethel herself had spent much of her childhood in County Clare . Julius and Ethel married on 1 October 1907 at the Church of Ireland St. Bartholomew's Church on Clyde Road in Ballsbridge , Dublin . Julius's work with
5159-413: Was Walton Athletic Club's best runner, a fact discovered when he passed the group while running alone. When asked why he ran so hard in training he replied: I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; it's the only way I can get some release. Due to the problems of counterfactual history , it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on
5236-585: Was a significant Sephardic Jewish district, to the extent that an 1878 magazine report reported that it was commonly called "New Jerusalem". The 1896 Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue, a Grade II listed building and headquarters of the British Sephardi community, is on Lauderdale Road . The actor Alec Guinness was born on this road. The first Prime Minister of Israel , David Ben-Gurion , lived within sight of this synagogue on Warrington Crescent . The pioneer of modern computing, Alan Turing ,
5313-655: Was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946 by King George VI for his wartime services, his work remained secret for many years. Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had specified an electromechanical machine called the bombe , which could break Enigma more effectively than the Polish bomba kryptologiczna , from which its name was derived. The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman , became one of
5390-423: Was born at what is now the Colonnade Hotel in Warrington Crescent. Maida Vale tube station was opened on 6 June 1915 on the Bakerloo line . Warwick Avenue tube station on the same line had been opened a few months earlier. Maida Vale is home to some of BBC network radio's recording and broadcast studios. The building on Delaware Road is one of the BBC's earliest premises, pre-dating Broadcasting House, and
5467-671: Was cut short by Morcom's death, in February 1930, from complications of bovine tuberculosis , contracted after drinking infected cow's milk some years previously. The event caused Turing great sorrow. He coped with his grief by working that much harder on the topics of science and mathematics that he had shared with Morcom. In a letter to Morcom's mother, Frances Isobel Morcom (née Swan), Turing wrote: I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt
5544-420: Was elected a Fellow of King's College on the strength of his dissertation where he served as a lecturer . However, and, unknown to Turing, this version of the theorem he proved in his paper, had already been proven, in 1922, by Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg . Despite this, the committee found Turing's methods original and so regarded the work worthy of consideration for the fellowship. Abram Besicovitch 's report for
5621-813: Was on leave from his position with the Indian Civil Service (ICS) of the British Raj government at Chatrapur , then in the Madras Presidency and presently in Odisha state, in India . Turing's father was the son of a clergyman, the Rev. John Robert Turing, from a Scottish family of merchants that had been based in the Netherlands and included a baronet . Turing's mother, Julius's wife,
5698-446: Was originally posed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1928. Turing proved that his "universal computing machine" would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm . He went on to prove that there was no solution to the decision problem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable : it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether
5775-554: Was required to sign the Official Secrets Act , in which he agreed not to disclose anything about his work at Bletchley, with severe legal penalties for violating the Act. Specifying the bombe was the first of five major cryptanalytical advances that Turing made during the war. The others were: deducing the indicator procedure used by the German navy; developing a statistical procedure dubbed Banburismus for making much more efficient use of
5852-439: Was so determined to attend that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to Sherborne, stopping overnight at an inn. Turing's natural inclination towards mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on the classics . His headmaster wrote to his parents: "I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he
5929-559: Was the centre of the BBC radio news service during World War II. The building houses seven music and radio drama studios. Most famously it was home to John Peel 's BBC Radio 1 Peel Sessions and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop . In 2018 the BBC announced plans to close the Maida Vale studios and relocate its functions to East London. Little Venice is a comparatively recent name for parts of Maida Vale and Paddington in
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