Turing's On Computable Numbers
1936 · Work
A 24-year-old Cambridge fellow, answering an abstract question in logic, imagines a machine that reads and writes symbols on an endless tape — and proves that one such machine could imitate every other. The universal Turing machine is the founding document of computing: every laptop and phone since is an engineering of this paper's idea, published before a single computer existed.
On these timelines: The Digital Revolution, Science & Technology, Master, Arts and Thoughts, England
More from The Digital Revolution
- Invention of the World Wide Web (1989)
- Google founded (1998)
- Moore's Law formulated (1965)
- Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
- Mosaic makes the web visual (1993)
- First email sent (1971)
- Pong launches the video-game industry (1972)
Around 1936
- World War II (1939)
- Battle of Britain (1940)
- Great Depression (1929)
- Battle of Stalingrad (1942)
- Chinese Civil War (resumed) (1945)
- Manhattan Project (1942)
- The Holocaust (1941)
- Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany (1933)
- Spanish Civil War (1936)
- Winston Churchill's first premiership (1940)