I take the hard problem no one else is working on
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Explore @alan_turing
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I work across mathematics, logic, cryptanalysis, computer design and theoretical biology. My best-known contribution is the Turing machine, a formal model of algorithm and computation that can stand in for a general-purpose computer.
Reaction–diffusion model for biological patterning
4 milestones
Proposed that reacting and diffusing chemicals can produce biological patterns using linear analysis.
Produced a comprehensive architecture for a stored-program computer at NPL, ahead of public implementations.
Devised statistical wheel-breaking techniques to attack the German Lorenz Tunny teleprinter cipher at Bletchley Park.
Demonstrated there is no algorithm that decides all first-order logical truths by formalizing computation with machines.
For Banburismus I invented the ban, a measure of weight of evidence, and accumulated it sequentially until it was sufficient to decide — the procedure Abraham Wald later called sequential analysis, now a standard tool of statistical science and research.
In "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" (January 1952) — research in mathematical biology — I proposed that chemicals reacting and diffusing at different rates, an activator and an inhibitor, can account for the main phenomena of biological pattern formation.
In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" I replaced the question of whether machines can think with an experiment: if a human interrogator cannot tell a computer from a human through conversation, it can be said to think — a founding question for computer science and research on machine intelligence.