Alan Turing is rightly regarded as the father of computer science. Born on June 23, 1912, he demonstrated an early talent for mathematics and the sciences. He began solving mathematical problems even before acquiring the necessary knowledge of advanced mathematics. Despite his exceptional intelligence, he failed to secure a scholarship to Trinity College, his first choice, but ultimately attended King’s College, Cambridge.

As a student, Turing sought to solve David Hilbert's problem, which involved investigating whether an algorithm could exist that, given a logical expression as input, would always yield a correct YES or NO answer.

Turing's solution was a hypothetical computing machine, which became known as the Turing Machine. The Turing Machine, with an appropriate set of rules, can perform various computations. Turing’s concept was that of a general-purpose machine, limited only by computational resources such as memory and processing power. All modern computers are fundamentally based on the principles of the Turing Machine.

During World War II, Turing devised a machine capable of decrypting messages encoded by the German Enigma machine. Many historians suggest that the decryption of these messages brought the war to an end several years earlier than it otherwise might have.

In 1948, Turing began developing a chess program for a computer that had not yet been built. By 1949, he tackled the challenge of artificial intelligence and proposed the famous Turing Test, which posits that a machine achieves intelligence when its responses to questions are indistinguishable from those of a human.

Turing was openly homosexual at a time when homosexuality was a crime. He was prosecuted and sentenced to hormonal treatments intended to suppress his libido. Tragically, he died by suicide using cyanide in 1954.