Who Alan Turing was

Who is Alan Turing, explained in plain English

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and one of the key figures behind modern computing and artificial intelligence.

During World War II, he played a major role in breaking the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park – work that helped shorten the war and likely saved countless lives.

But his influence goes well beyond that.

Turing was one of the first people to ask a question that still comes up today: can machines think? He proposed what’s now known as the “Turing Test”, a way of judging whether a machine’s responses are indistinguishable from a human’s.

He also developed early ideas about how computers could work, long before modern machines existed.

In many ways, the AI tools we use today trace back to that early thinking.