Inventors
Alan Turing
1912–1954 · Theorist of the universal machine
Britain
Before a room of tubes existed, Turing described a machine that could imitate any other by changing its table of rules. Wartime work on ciphers, then early stored-program computers, sit beside that paper. He is here because software needed a person who treated computation as a thing, not a clerk.
Why it mattered
- Gave computing a mathematical object — the universal machine.
- Linked abstract procedure to physical hardware.
