People from Maida Vale - Alan Turing, Victor Gollancz, Bradley Wiggins, Leslie Green, Tony Meehan, Philip Guedalla, Steve McFadden, Irene Handl (Paperback)

Chapters: Alan Turing, Victor Gollancz, Bradley Wiggins, Leslie Green, Tony Meehan, Philip Guedalla, Steve Mcfadden, Irene Handl, Terence Fisher, Ernest Clark, Billy Moon. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 74. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (pronounced; 23 June 1912 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was influential in the development of computer science and providing a formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, playing a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE. Towards the end of his life Turing became interested in chemistry. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the BelousovZhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s. Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that timeand he accepted treatment with female hormones, chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, from an apparently self-administered cyanide poisoning, although his mother (and some others) considered his death ...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=1208