{"id":53536,"date":"2012-01-17T08:12:01","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T13:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=53536"},"modified":"2012-03-06T10:23:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T15:23:30","slug":"einsteins-equal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/01\/einsteins-equal\/","title":{"rendered":"Einstein’s Equal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeremy<\/a>
Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of CLAS.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jeremy Teitelbaum<\/a>, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>, is a guest contributor to UConn Today. His posts appear on Mondays, except when a public holiday falls on a Monday. For his previous posts, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Alan M. Turing, a mathematician who created the discipline of computer science, built codebreaking machines that helped win World War II, and first explored the idea of machine intelligence in a systematic way. Turing is the Einstein of computer science, and considering the transformational impact of computing on our society, Turing\u2019s influence on today\u2019s world is every bit as important as that of Albert Einstein.<\/p>\n

\"Alan<\/a>Yet while Einstein lived to old age, venerated around the world, Turing killed himself in his early 40s after being hounded by the British government for his homosexuality. Turing illuminated the very essence of computation and helped to save civilization from the Nazis; yet society could not allow him to live peacefully and openly as a gay man. What a price to pay for bigotry.<\/p>\n

Turing made his mark on the world with his foundational paper, \u201cOn Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem<\/a>,\u201d published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society<\/em> in 1937. In this paper, Turing said that the following question does not have a solution: Could one reduce logical reasoning to a mechanical process? In other words, could one build a machine of some kind that could mechanically settle the truth or falsehood of mathematical theorems? This is the \u201cEntscheidungsproblem,\u201d or \u201cDecision Problem,\u201d of Turing\u2019s title.<\/p>\n

But Turing\u2019s contribution is more significant than the actual result he obtained. (In fact, the American logician Alonzo Church had obtained the same result as Turing a little bit earlier.)<\/p>\n

What distinguished Turing\u2019s work was his careful analysis of what it means to \u201ccompute\u201d something.<\/p>\n

In his paper, he describes a very simple machine, a kind of prototypical computer, and argues carefully that something is \u201ccomputable\u201d exactly when it can be computed on one of these machines.<\/p>\n

In making his definition, Turing found the exact balance between power \u2013 so that his machines can, indeed, do any procedure we might reasonably call a computation \u2013 and simplicity \u2013 so that one can reason abstractly about his machines and establish general results about what can be computed.<\/p>\n

Everyone who studies computer science or logic in a formal way now begins with Turing Machines<\/a>. This definition of computation, and the description of what we now call Turing Machines, was the transformational idea in Turing\u2019s paper.<\/p>\n

Following his theoretical contribution, Turing made a crucial practical one. As World War II began, the British government obtained information from the Polish Secret Service about the German cipher machine called Enigma<\/a> \u2013 which was used by all branches of the German military, especially the U-Boats. The British brought together a fascinating assortment of scientists, including Turing, linguists, chess and bridge players, and other polymaths, and gave them the job of breaking the Enigma<\/a>. Turing built a special purpose computing machine<\/a> designed to crack the Enigma cipher on an industrial scale. The resulting intelligence, called Ultra, provided a key strategic asset in WWII<\/a>,<\/a> especially during the battle of the North Atlantic against the U-Boats.<\/p>\n

After the war, Turing continued to blend his theoretical insights into computation with his goal to actually build a working computer. But his third decisive contribution was more philosophical. He published the paper \u201cComputing Machinery and Intelligence<\/a>\u201d in the journal Mind<\/em><\/a>, asking the question, \u201cCan machines think?\u201d His answer was \u201cyes, eventually,\u201d and he introduced the famous \u201cTuring Test\u201d for determining if a machine has crossed the boundary into intelligence. (While Turing\u2019s Entscheidungs problem paper is technical, his Mind<\/em> paper is very readable, and a lot of fun.)<\/p>\n

A hero of the war; inventor of a new discipline; and a provocative philosopher, Turing should have commanded the respect of the general public and the admiration of the scientific community.<\/p>\n

But Turing was gay, and obliged under the social norms of the time to keep that fact quiet. When a man with whom he was having a relationship robbed him, and Turing naively reported the robbery to the police, Turing found himself being prosecuted for indecency. He was required to undergo hormone treatments under the bizarre notion that his sexual orientation could be corrected. Depressed and alone, he killed himself with cyanide in 1954, a few weeks before his 42nd birthday.<\/p>\n

Turing\u2019s work, like Einstein\u2019s, is a powerful example of how even the most abstract and theoretical contributions can prove transformational in society. Amidst the constant demands that research be tied to specific economic payoffs, it\u2019s always worth bearing in mind that we need to leave space for the truly new and original, and that we can\u2019t know where the next real breakthrough might come from.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another lesson I draw from Turing\u2019s life. Our society cannot afford to continue to parse the phrase \u201cequal protection under the law.\u201d We should stand by our belief that each of us enjoys the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. We should end all forms of legal discrimination based on sexual preference. That would be a fitting memorial for this \u201cTuring Year<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

To learn more about Alan Turing\u2019s life and work, I recommend Alan Hodges\u2019 biography,<\/em> <\/em><\/a>Alan<\/em> <\/em>Turing<\/em>: <\/em>The<\/em> <\/em>Enigma<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Turing was also portrayed by Derek Jacobi in the play <\/em>Breaking<\/em> <\/em>the<\/em> <\/em>Code<\/em><\/a>. For an accessible technical introduction to the theory of computability and its applications in logic, I recommend Martin Davis\u2019s book <\/em>Computability<\/em> <\/em>and<\/em> <\/em>Unsolvability<\/em><\/a>. <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even helping win WWII didn’t protect Alan Turing from British government homophobia, says the dean of CLAS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[66],"class_list":["post-53536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-21 09:21:33","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53536"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53557,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53536\/revisions\/53557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53536"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=53536"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=53536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}