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Turing's legacy: developments from Turing's ideas in logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

By
Rod Downey
Edited by
Rod Downey
Rod Downey
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
Rod Downey
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
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Summary

§1. Introduction. The year 2012 was the centenary of the birth of one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. There were many celebrations of this fact, and many conferences based around Turing's work and life during 2012. In particular, there was a half year program (Syntax and Semantics) at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, and many “Turing 100/Centenary” conferences throughout the year. These events included truly major meetings featuring many of the world's best mathematicians and computer scientists (and even Gary Kasparov) around his actual birth day of June 23, including The Incomputable, ACM A. M. Turing Centenary Celebration, How the World Computes (CiE 2012), and The Turing Centenary Conference. There are also a number of publications devoted to Turing's life, work and legacy.

To the general public, Turing is probably best known for his part in Bletchley Park and the war-winning efforts of the code-breakers at Hut 8. To biologists, Turing is best known for his work on morphogenesis, the paper “A Chemical Basis for Morphogenesis” being his most highly cited work.

To logicians, and computer scientists, Alan Turing is best known for his work in computation, arguably leading to the development of the digital computer. This development has caused almost certainly the most profound change in human history in the last century. Turing's work in computation grew from philosophical questions in logic. Thus it seems fitting that the Association for Symbolic Logic sponsored this volume.

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Turing's Legacy
Developments from Turing's Ideas in Logic
 , pp. vii - x
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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References

[1] Jack, Copeland, The essential Turing, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, September 2004.
[2] Jack, Copeland, Alan Turing's automatic computing engine: The master codebreaker's struggle to build the modern computer, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, June 2005.
[3] Jack, Copeland and Diane, Proudfoot, Alan Turing father of the modern computer, The Rutherford Journal, vol. 4 (2011–2012), http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article040101.html.Google Scholar
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[6] Gary, Kasparov and Frederic, Friedel, The reconstruction of Turing's “Paper Machine”.
[7] Alan, Turing, On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 42 (1936), pp. 230–265, correction in Proceedings ofthe London Mathematical Society vol. 43 (1937), pp. 544-546.Google Scholar
[8] Alan, Turing, Systems of logic based on ordinals, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 45 (1939), no. 2, pp. 161–228.Google Scholar
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[10] Alan, Turing, A note on normal numbers, Collected works of A. M. Turing: Pure mathematics (J. L., Britton, editor), North Holland, Amsterdam, 1992, pp. 117–119, with notes of the editor in 263-265.

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