Alan Turing

Alan Turing

A British mathematician and codebreaker whose 1936 concept of a universal computing machine underpins all modern computers, and whose 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" proposed the Turing test and posed the founding question of AI: can machines think? Turing's wartime codebreaking work at Bletchley Park was also foundational to practical computing. He is widely regarded as the father of computer science and theoretical AI. (See also: Turing test)