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Examples of Scientists - Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done - Alan Turing - Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

Index

Alan Turing's background

Konrad Zuse's background

What makes Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse such a great example?

Alan Turing's background

Alan Turing was an English mathematician and logician who formalised the concept of a general-purpose computer with his 1936 'Turing machine', led the team at Bletchley Park that broke the German Enigma cipher during the Second World War, and later proposed the 'Turing Test' for machine intelligence. Prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality, then still a criminal offence in Britain, he was chemically castrated and died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning, ruled a suicide. He is now widely regarded as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

Konrad Zuse's background

Konrad Zuse was a German civil engineer who, working alone and largely unaware of parallel efforts abroad, built the Z3 in 1941, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer, followed by the first commercial computer, the Z4, and the first high-level programming language, Plankalkul. Because his work was developed in wartime Germany and destroyed or hidden during the war, it remained little known outside Germany for decades, and he is now recognised alongside Turing as one of the independent originators of the modern computer.

What makes Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse such a great example?

Birth of Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse

Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse make a good paired example of simultaneous, independent invention: working on opposite sides of the same war, without knowledge of each other, both arrived at the fundamental idea of the programmable computer within a few years of each other. It is a useful test of whether astrology can show the same underlying breakthrough occurring twice, unconnected, at around the same historical moment.

The chart shown is Alan Turing's birthchart, together with transits for his 1936 formulation of the Turing machine, guessed at midday, around the outside. Aspect lines [traditional] are between the transits and his birthchart.