Sukonrat LO: Alan Turing

During the Second World War, a team of British Mathematicians assembled at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Their goal was to support the United Kingdom during the war through technological means. The German Nazis were using a system of scrambled messages called “The Enigma,” and the British wanted to figure out what they were communicating to one another to help boost their odds of defeating Germany. Alan Turing, inspired by ideas of Mathematical Logic, was one of the Mathematicians at the School. A few years earlier, he designed a universal coding machine now known as the “Turing machine” that followed any set of instructions. In 1939, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, and their team at Bletchley Park eventually designed “The Bombe,” a code-breaking machine that deciphered the Germans’ complex communications system. Roughly 211 of these machines were created, and they were vital in helping the British break the Germans’ enigma codes. I admire Alan Turing and his team because they jumpstarted one of the first large computational projects in modern history, and they primarily used their intelligence to help their nation and saved many lives. This project was also one of the first ones to show that, if used correctly, machines can aid humans in their research and advancement.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code