Alan Turing who revolutionized our understanding of machines, intelligence and computation was born #OTD in 1912. Turing played a critical role in cracking the German enigma code during WW2. Hounded by Britain's regressive anti-homosexual laws, he committed suicide in 1954. 
Two of Turing's many important papers laid the foundations of computer science. His 1936 paper introduced the Turing Machine and, hinting at Gödel's earlier papers, proved that a general procedure for Hilbert's "decision problem" is impossible. Alonzo Church proved the same thing
His 1950 paper effectively asked whether a machine is intelligent by proposing the Imitation Game of Turing Test, a game in which a human interacting with a machine would receive responses that would be indistinguishable from that given by humans.
If you want to read more about the real Turing, you can do no better than read Andrew Hodges's fantastic, definitive biography. If you want to be merely entertained by a fictional Turing, you should watch the film "The Imitation Game".
Personally I regard the British government's punishment of Turing's sexuality as one of the most heinous assaults of the state on individual rights in history. I consider the Queen's posthumous pardon of Turing to be both too late and utterly irrelevant and self-serving.
Turing's contributions were seminal and fascinating but he was not working alone. A forgotten contributor is Emil Post who astonishingly anticipated both Turing and Gödel's work. Alonzo Church of Princeton came up with similar ideas as Turing's 1936 paper around the same time.
@threadreaderapp can you unroll please
