Turing Defines the Computer in "On Computable Numbers"
- Date
- 1936
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Europe (United Kingdom)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" laid the theoretical foundation of the modern computer.
Submitted to the London Mathematical Society in 1936 (and printed in 1937), the paper answered a deep question posed by mathematician David Hilbert: whether every mathematical statement could be decided by a mechanical procedure. To prove that some cannot, the 24-year-old Cambridge mathematician invented an abstract device—now called the Turing machine—that reads and writes symbols on an infinite tape according to a finite table of rules. Crucially, Turing described a single "universal machine" that could simulate any other by reading its instructions as data, anticipating the idea of the general-purpose, programmable computer decades before the hardware existed. The paper also demonstrated the existence of undecidable problems, showing that no algorithm can determine in advance whether an arbitrary program will ever halt. Regarded as perhaps the most important paper in the theory of computation, it made Turing the intellectual father of computer science and shaped everything from wartime codebreaking to today's digital world.
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Empires active in 1936
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Discovery of nuclear fissionDecember 1938 (explained January–February 1939)
- Penicillin and the dawn of the antibiotic era1928 (developed for clinical use 1940–1945)
- Formulation of quantum mechanics1925–1927
- Haber-Bosch Process Industrialises Synthetic Nitrogen FertiliserSeptember 1913
- The Wright Brothers' Powered Flight17 December 1903
- Discovery of X-rays and radioactivity1895–1898
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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