Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England. His parents were stationed in India with the Indian Civil Service, and the young Alan was left in England in the care of friends and family, an early experience of emotional displacement that may have contributed to his characteristic quality of radical self-sufficiency. He showed exceptional mathematical ability from childhood, reportedly rediscovering trigonometry on his own before being taught it, and his headmaster wrote that he was 'a boy of exceptional ability who shows his own mind in everything.' He studied mathematics at King's College Cambridge, where he was elected a Fellow in 1935 at age twenty-two.
In 1936, Turing published 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem' — a paper that defined the theoretical limits of computation by introducing the concept of the Turing machine, an abstract model of a computer capable of performing any computation that could be described algorithmically. This paper, written before electronic computers existed, established the mathematical foundations on which every subsequent computer was built. During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, where he was the central figure in breaking the German Enigma cipher — a contribution that historians estimate shortened the war by two to four years and saved between 14 and 21 million lives.
After the war, Turing worked on early computers at the National Physical Laboratory and the University of Manchester, contributing foundational work in computing architecture and programming. In 1950 he published 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' which proposed the Turing Test as a criterion for machine intelligence and effectively founded the field of artificial intelligence as a scientific discipline. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality under the then-current British law, convicted, and subjected to chemical castration. He died on June 7, 1954, of cyanide poisoning — officially ruled a suicide, though the circumstances have been disputed.
Turing's legacy is one of the most genuine injustices in the history of science: the man who arguably did more than any other individual to win World War II and who founded two of the most important scientific disciplines of the twentieth century was destroyed by his own government for his private life. He was granted a royal pardon in 2013 and is now commemorated on the British fifty-pound note. His story is a defining case of the INTP's particular vulnerability: the mind that operates so far ahead of its social context that the context cannot recognize what it has in its possession until the damage has been done.
