Alan Turing

In this first installment of IT Professional's new Mastermind department, which will profile innovators, inventors, and key people in the fields of IT, computer science, and information systems, George Strawn reflects on the father of computer science, Alan Turing. He focuses on Turing's early theoretical work, noting how unusual it is for a major theoretical result to precede any practice in a field. Turing devised a simple process for creating theoretical machines that could implement such procedures, and he conjectured that these machines could compute anything that was computable (in other words, they defined computability).