Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Industrial Age

Formalization of universal computation — Alan Turing

1936 AD · Transmission: Global
ComputingTheoryBritish

In 1936 Alan Turing published the article that founded the theory of computation. To answer Hilbert's decision problem, he built an abstract mathematical model — the Turing machine — capable of executing any computable procedure. He demonstrated that there exists a universal machine that can simulate any other. The consequence was twofold: it defined the limits of what is computable (some problems no machine can solve, like the Halting Problem) and provided the conceptual framework on which Von Neumann, Hopper, and the ENIAC team would build the first real computers. Turing also contributed decisively to breaking Enigma during World War II — work documented in the corpus entry rejewski-enigma-1932.

InstitutionKing's College Cambridge
Historical regionCambridge, United Kingdom
Primary sourceTuring, A.M. — "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936)
Secondary sourceHodges, A. — Alan Turing: The Enigma (Burnett Books, 1983)
Original languageEnglish
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