ABSTRACT
Alan Mathison Turing was born in 1912 in London, England. He died tragically in 1954 in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. Today, Turing is considered to have been one of the great mathematical minds of the twentieth century. He did not invent cryptography (as we shall see, even Julius Caesar engaged in cryptography). But he ushered cryptography into the modern age. The current vigorous interaction of cryptography with computer science owes its genesis in significant part to the work of Turing. Turing also played a decisive role in many of the key ideas of modern logic. It is arguable that Turing had the key ideas for inventing the stored program computer (although it was John von Neumann (1903–1957), another twentieth-century mathematical genius, who together with Herman Goldstine (1913–2004), actually carried out the ideas).
