Alan Turing was one of the leading theoreticians of digital computer science during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Throughout his life, he used mathematics as a way to explore whether nature, including human thought, worked like a machine. He is generally considered to be the founder of the field of artificial intelligence.

Turing was born in London, England. His father was a colonial civil servant and his mother came from a family of scholarly men and women. Turing received his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University in 1935. He spent the next three years doing graduate work at Princeton University, where he worked with the logician Alonzo Church.

While at Princeton, Turing defined a theoretical machine that used a binary code to solve mathematical problems or carry out a series of instructions one step at a time. The machine could work with only a specified number of conditions...