Alan Turing was born in  London on June 23,1912 and the son of a high-ranking British colonial administrator based in India. His parents did not want their children to be brought up there, so they left them to be raised by family friends. Young Turing had a unique and brilliant mind. At boarding school, a teenage Turing formed a close bond with Christopher Morcom, over their love of science. When Morcom died unexpectedly in 1930, Turing was devastated. In letters to Morcom's mother, he wondered whether Morcom's mind could possibly live on without his body. The loss changed Turing, plunging him into a philosophical, mathmatical, and scientific investigation of the human mind that would last a lifetime.  He persued advanced scientific and mathmatical studies, receiving a degree in mathmatics from Cambridge University in 1934 and a doctorate in mathmatics from Princeton University in 1938.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     As a postgraduate student, Turing wrote an influential proof challenging a theory of venerated mathmatician David Hilbert, who sumised that there was no such thing as an unsolvable mathmatical problem. As part of the proof, Turing laid out a thought experiment that described a device now known as the "Turing Machine."  The hypothetical device could read input from an infinitely long tape and solve problems according to a set of rules. A true Turing machine was impossible to build, but the concept--a replicable machine that could be programed, store information, and perform calculations--set the stage for modern computers. During World War II, Turing worked on another form of complex computation: CODEBREAKING. He was tasked with tackling how to decipher German messages scrambled by Enigma, a machine that turned words into gibberish. The code that resulted could only be deciphered by someone with their own Enigma machine and a separate key that told them to configure it--and changed daily.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Enigma could generate billions of possible combinations, and had stumped Allied codebreakers. But within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park--a code and cypher school that  was home to Allied codebreaking efforts--Turing cracked the code. He did so by designing VICTORY, a machine that mechanized codebreaking by using multiple Enigmas to narrow down the probable messages. With Turing's help, Allied forces knew when and where German U-boats planned to attack. When the Germans switched to the Lorenz, an even more complex device, Turing developed a technique that helped crack its encoded messages, too, giving the Allied an inside look at detailed messages Hitler and his army exchanged with their most senior military officials. The codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park is thought to have shortened the war by up to four years. Turing "saved Britain from a Nazi dark age," wrote fellow codebreaker Jerry Roberts--and the British government agreed, awarding Turing Order of the British Empire, the nation's highest honor, for his wartime achievements. But the operation, and Turing's role in it, remained secret until the 1970s, when Bletchley Park's role in WW II was declassified.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          The Imitation Game:  But the secrecy of Turing's work at Bletchley Park hampered him professionally. In 1945 he proposed an advanced calculating device he called The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)--a computer that would have been the most advanced of its era. "ACE was the first complete electronic computer design," writes computer engineer and historian Brian Edward Carpenter. However, Turing had trouble convincing his colleagues, who were in the dark about his earlier successes, that the idea was feasible. He had to fight to have it built, and when British government workers produced the first ACE, it was a simpler model. Turing went on to work at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he continued exploring his idea of a universal computing machine. There, he also tackled the concept of artificial intelligence and grappled with questions about whether machines could think.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Turing had a brilliant mind. But his sexuality put him at rish at a time when homosexuality was against  the law. In 1952, Turing's home was burgled, and, during the course of the investigation, he told police that the burglar was his former boyfriend.Turing was charged with gross indecency and pleaded guilty. Rather than serve a jail sentence, he opted for probation and "chemical castration"--injection with estrogen--designed to reduce his sexual libido. As a convicted criminal, Turing lost his security clearance, and his year of estrogen injections rendered him impotent. On June 7, 1954, his housekeeper found him in his bed, dead at 41. A half eaten apple, suspected by some to have been laced with cyanide, was found near his body.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Over time, his contribution to both the war effort and modern computer science is becoming clearer. So is his prescience. As he said in a 1951 interview, "If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we can. And then where would we be?