IN 1935, Alan Turing set out to build a reputation by outflanking the world’s leading mathematician. Turing was 22 years old, and a new fellow at Cambridge. His target, David Hilbert, was the ...
For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily ...
When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. In 1928, the German mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann proposed a question called the ...