Popular science talk about Alan Turing, father of Computer Science, intellectual giant of the 20th century, persecuted by his own government despite helping to win the war a few years earlier.

The talk describes the intellectual environment for Turing’s work, going back to the formalist endeavours of Russel and Hilbert and culminating in Turing’s definition of the “Univerval Machine,” known today as the Turing machine and the birth of the computer; the cryptoanalytic work of Turing’s group at Bletchley Park for breaking the German coding machine Enigma; and a brief appraisal of the role of Computer Science in today’s technological and scientific reality to establish the importance of Turing’s work.

• 5-7 October 2010, Alan Turing – människan som maskin, Teknik- och Naturvetarcirkeln, lectures in Halmstad, Lund, and Växjö. In Swedish.
• 19 January 2011, 19.00 Malmö Konsthall, lecture in connection with an exhibition of Danish artist Henrik Olesen. In Swedish.

Further reading

• At Wikipedia: Alan Turing, Enigma Machine, Foundational crisis of mathematics
• On Youtube: Turing Machine
• Hodges, Andrew (1983). Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon & Schuster. A splendid biography of Turing.
• Doxiadis, Papadimitriou, Papadatos, and Di Donna. Logicomix: An epic search for truth. Very good comic about the foundational crisis of mathematics, focussing on Bertrand Russel.