Alan Turing: person of the XXth century?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2013.764n6008Keywords:
mathematics, logic, cryptography, scientific computation, artificial intelligenceAbstract
“Time” magazine chose Albert Einstein as “Person of the Century.” This was undoubtedly a reasonable choice, but as I will argue in this article, there are also good reasons for contending that Turing might have received this honor. One such reason I consider here is his purely scientific work, which stems from the greatest mathematical tradition, and how it affected the development of mathematics itself and was finally instrumental in shaping a new technological world. This is true both as regards the computation and treatment of information as well as the establishment of new forms of social relations. In relation to the foregoing, we have Turing’s contributions to the deciphering of secret codes during the Second World War, which in a somewhat metaphorical sense may be regarded as a new tool for undermining personal privacy, that civil right whose denial finally ruined his life
Downloads
References
Appel, A.W. (Ed.) (2012). Alan Turing's System of Logic. The Princeton Thesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1959). "On certain formal properties of grammars". Information and Control, 2, pp. 137-167. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(59)90362-6
Church, A. (1936a). "An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory". American Journal of Mathematics, 58, pp. 345-363. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2371045
Church, A. (1936b). "A note on the Entscheidungsproblem". Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1, pp. 40-41. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2269326
Church, A. (1936c). "A note on the Entscheidungsproblem, Correction". Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1, pp. 101-102. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2269030
Churchland, P. M and Smith Churchland, P. (1990). "Could a machine think?". Scientific American, 262 (1), pp. 26-31 and pp. 32-37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0190-32
Copeland, J. (ed.) (2004). The Essential Turing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 127.
Davis, M. (ed.) (1965). The undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions. Hewlett, N. Y.: Raven Press, pp. 39-74.
Dyson, G. (2012). Turing's Cathedral. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 259.
Frodeman, R. (ed.) (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gödel, K. (1931). "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I". Monantshefter für Mathematik und Physik, 38, pp. 173-198. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01700692
Gödel, K. (2003). Collected Works, vol. V (Correspondence H-Z), S. Feferman, J. W. Dawson, jr., W. Goldfarb, Ch. Parsons and W. Sieg, eds.; Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 147.
Gödel, K. (1958). "Über eine bisher noch nicht benützte Erweiterung des finiten Standpunktes" ("On a hitherto unutilized extension of the finitary standpoint"). Dialectica 12, pp. 280-287; pp. 245, 275.
Gödel, K. (1934). "Postcriptum" to On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems (mimeographed lecture notes delivered in 1934). Published in Martin Davis (ed.), The undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions. Hewlett, N. Y.: Raven Press, pp. 39-74.
Gödel, K. (1974). "Some remarks on the undecidability results". In Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 325-326.
Hilbert, D. (1902). "Problèmes futures des Mathématiques". In Compte Rendu du Deuxième Congrès International des Mathématiciens tenu a Paris du 6 au 12 Aout 1900, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, pp. 58-114.
Hilbert, D. (1929, 1930). "Probleme der Grundlegung der Mathematik". Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici. Bologna 3-10 Settembre 1928, tome I. Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna 192), pp. 135-141; also published in Mathematische Annalen 102, 1-9 (1930); pp. 3-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01782335
Hilton, P. (1989). "Reminiscences of Bletchley Park, 1942-1945" In A Century of Mathematics in America, Part I, pp. 291-301.
Hodges, A. (2012). Alan Turing: The Enigma. Simon and Schuster, New York 1983; new edition: Random House, London.
Isaacson, W. (1999). "Who mattered and why", Time, December 31, 1999.
Kleene, S.C. (1989). "The role of logical investigations in Mathematics since 1930". In A Century of Mathematics in America, Part I, Peter Duren, ed.; American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, pp. 85-94.
Leavitt, D. (2006). The Man Who Knew too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. Norton, New York.
Newman, M. H. A. (1955). "Alan Mathison Turing, 1912-1954". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1, pp. 253-263. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1955.0019
Sánchez Ron, J. M. (2011). La Nueva Ilustración Ciencia, tecnología y humanidades en un mundo interdisciplinar. Oviedo: Ediciones Nobel.
Searle, J. R. (1980). "Minds, brain and programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, pp. 417-457. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756
Searle, J. R. (1990). "Is the brain's mind a computer program?". Scientific American, 262 (1), pp. 26-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0190-26
Turing, A. (1937a). "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42, pp. 230-265. http://dx.doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230
Turing, A. (1937b). "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. A correction". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 43, pp. 544-546.
Turing, A. (1939). "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, pp. 161-228. http://dx.doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-45.1.161
Turing, S. (2012). Alan M. Turing. W. Heffer & Sons, 1959; new edition: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
von Neumann, J. (1948, 1995). "The general and logical theory of automata". In Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior – The Hixon symposium September 1948, L. A. Jeffress, ed. (California Institute of Technology), reprinted in The Neumann Compendium, F. Bródy and T. Vámos, eds. (World Scientific, Singapore 1995), pp. 526-556; see pp. 551-553.
von Neumann, J. (2005). Selected Letters, Miklós Rédei, ed. American Mathematical Society/London Mathematical Society, pp. 178-179.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2013 Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
© CSIC. Manuscripts published in both the printed and online versions of this Journal are the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and quoting this source is a requirement for any partial or full reproduction.All contents of this electronic edition, except where otherwise noted, are distributed under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International” (CC BY 4.0) License. You may read here the basic information and the legal text of the license. The indication of the CC BY 4.0 License must be expressly stated in this way when necessary.
Self-archiving in repositories, personal webpages or similar, of any version other than the published by the Editor, is not allowed.
