hello I'm Professor Brian Cox welcome to people of science [Music] they wendyhall thank you for joining us and could you just give us a brief description of who you are and what you do yeah it's a pleasure to be here and talk about one of my heroes I'm a mathematician originally and I'm most well known these days for my work in multimedia and hypermedia and the web and the Internet but in my early career I did all sorts of things in computing including teaching about Turing machines and when I was asked to do this how
could I choose anybody better than the person who really gave us the theory for everything we're doing today with computers Alan Turing I suppose how ensuring his most well known for his code-breaking we'll talk about that later but his early career and working on the theory of computing I would have thought most people would be surprised that you need it why do we need a theory of computing and what do you what do you do well because before Turing we didn't have machines that you could program in the way we think of them today because
in those days human beings for call computers we're talking here the 1930s when he went to King's College I'm read mathematics and he started thinking about how could a machine imitate what human beings could do in terms of doing the mathematics to perform much bigger and much more complicated problems much more quickly and he developed the universal Turing machine and proved that that could compute anything can you describe it just very briefly well it's basically you run a tape through the machine and there are instructions it's not someone's and the algorithm that you designed to
do the computing basically shifts the tape backwards or forwards depending on what the instruction is so it's as simple as that and then can we move on to his most famous work Bletchley Park the code breaking during the war so what was he doing there he went there at the beginning of the war I guess the government were looking for all the bright young mathematicians there was all about cracking the codes the Germans used and cheering led a team to build what became known as the bomb with an e and if you go to Bletchley
Park now you can see a replica of the bomb actually working so it's essentially a prototype computer yes it was an early form of a computer yeah interestingly I think that the war was a continuation of his academic work it was just applied in a way that you know shortened the war and saved a lot of lives so this is the certificate of a candidate for election this tells us he wasn't elected the first year he was put forward which is true for most people yeah there's very few people that get it the first year
but he went in in 51 yeah but interesting no it's a really long mention of the war he has work since 1945 but you see a nice 50 they couldn't talk about Percy Park that's interesting isn't it so he was elected perhaps without the knowledge of what he did exactly that really does speak to his eminence as a mathematician doesn't it [Music] when you went to Bletchley Park and you look to his office which is still there did you get more of a sense of the man it's a replica of his office but it it's
beautifully done and there's all the sort of artifacts at that time the 1940s he had to type prices they set up in his office and both them said do not use this machine leave as is right so he was clearly very precious about his own stuff his own possessions it's an interesting picture you paint of this man because I was surprised when I saw that he almost qualified for the 1948 Olympics he was a runner and of course you know hit the end was very sad he was homosexual which of course completely legally in those
days and he outed himself to the police because his lover has stole from him and he named him to the police and that's how it became known that he was homosexual so they charged him and offered him a prison sentence or chemical castration what a choice and he chose the chemical castration and then of course he died in 1954 the inquest said it was suicide but we won't ever really know the truth of what happened but it's tragic to lose someone so bright and who could have done so much it's legacy now in terms of
the theoretical work around computing does that still echo today absolutely he still his theories are still talked i mean we're moving into the world of quantum I bet he'd had been there before all of us but in terms of the computers we use today and the computers we have in our mobile phones everything we do today with computers is based on his original theory it's quite amazing you [Music]
