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On the Gaussian error function (1935)

When Turing was an undergraduate he rediscovered an exceedingly important theorem in


statistics, the Central Limit Theorem (He was not aware that it had already been proven
when he started working on.). Furthermore, he made progress on a closely related theorem
that had not been known at the time. This was all part of a major undergraduate project.
His brilliance as an undergraduate at Kings was very much recognized by his teachers, and
that is reflected in his appointment to the department.
I should also note that people forget that Turing did such major work in probability and
statistics, and I strongly suspect that this is why he was able to develop his method of
Banburismus that played such a big role in decrypting Enigma traffic. And this is as good as
spot as any to add that Turing's statistical approach there was a very Bayesian one, as noted
by Robert J. Kolker in the comments.

On computable numbers, with an application to


theEntscheidungsproblem (1936)
This, of course, is the paper that made him (correctly) a star. Non-mathematians will know
of it as the paper that is foundational to everything we do with computers. And that is true.
But what many people don't recognize is that Turing's formalizaton of what an automatic
computing machine was not the point of the paper.
He used what he was able to prove about such "machines" to answer a much bigger
problem: In an appropriately axiomatized system, is there a definite procedure that can be
used to determine which statements within that system are provable? The fact that the
answer was "no", along with Gdel's famous theorem, have changed the way
mathematicians look at mathematics. This is truly foundational.
Now, Alonzo Church had beat Turing to the punch on that answer, but Turing's paper
brought such new insight into the actual problem, and into so many other groundbreaking
things along the way, that it stands as one of the most important mathematical papers of the
20th century.
If I may quote myself from Alan Turing's contribution can't be computed:

I like to call the second millennium the millennium of the algorithm. An algorithm is a
finite list of step-by-step instructions that, if followed, will get you a result. [...] These
algorithms for arithmetic were developed and described by Muammad ibn Ms alKhwrizm in about 825CE and translated to Latin in the 12th century. It is from alKhwrizms name that we get the word algorithm. [...] In the final century of the
millennium, Alan Turing found a way to treat algorithms as mathematical objects.
We now know how to talk about what algorithms can and can't do all because Turing
invented a mathematics of algorithms on his way to answering one of the most important
mathematical questions of the day.

Computability and -calculus (1937-1938)


As I mentioned above Alonzo Church proved the same ultimate result as Turing did in On
Computable Numbers. Church developed a kind of logic, called -calculus, that expressed
computation in a sort of logical form instead of Turing's use of step by step algorithms.
Turing wrote a number of papers exploring both how these very different systems were
"equivalent" while at the same time being very different in what sorts of things one could
easily do with them.
Anyone studying Computer Science today will be presented with "functional languages"
(like LISP, Prolog, Haskell) and "procedural languages" (things like C, Algol, etc). Whatever
the advantages of functional languages are, the actual hardware in the center of computers
runs procedurally. Some work that Turing did not only helps us better understand what
these sorts of systems, but how to "translate" back and forth between them.

Codebreaking (1938-1945)
Because nothing was published as mathematics by the people involved and because this was
very much a team effort, it can be difficult to sort what math came from where. The crucial
mathematical insight into breaking Enigma was developed by Polish mathematicians, who
passed on everything they knew to British Intelligence via France at the outbreak of the war.
But there was still a lot of math to do at Bletchley. On their own, the Polish discoveries
would not be usable to break traffic anywhere quickly enough to be useful. Of the many
things that were developed in breaking Enigma was a method that only Turing could have
come up with. It required insights into information theory/statistics, computation, and
effective procedures: Banburismus. This was an algorithm for tallying whether they had
enough information (yet) to set machines (bombes) working on finding the daily settings.

There were other things as well. Turing literally wrote the book on Enigma that was used
internally. (Fortunately a copy of "the Prof's book" survived in the US and was declassified
in the late 1990s. I was among the first uncleared people to see it.)
Turing and Huge Alexander were largely responsible for designing the bombes that were
able to efficiently make use of what "groups" were discovered manually. These were not
machines that searched all possible combinations. Instead they searched through a much
reduced space and were able to eliminate whole sets of possible solutions in a single "tick".
Of course only the mathematicians who worked with Turing on this were aware of any of
this work.

Rounding-off errors in matrix processes (1948)


In the comments, Justin Rising drew my attention to Turing's tremendous contributions to
numerical analysis. Something I know nothing about. When you perform computations on
rounded numbers (e.g., something like 3.14159) your necessary rounding errors can
accumulate over many computations. When performing calculations with matrices, you will
have lots of computations, and it is possible for the rounding errors to and feed into each
other in such a way that there is far more error than meaning in the final output.
If I understand this correctly, Turing developed both an algorithm for keeping these under
control when performing matrix operations but also a way to talk about how well under
control the accumulation of rounding errors are. Not a subject I know about, but to quote
Justin Rising in his comment, this was "arguably the most important numerical method of
the 20th century".

Morphogenetic patterns (19521953)


Turing did important mathematical work in biology, specifically embryology. I don't know
the history of these field well enough to say whether he was so far ahead of his time, that his
approach was only later rediscovered or whether much of what is done today directly
descends from his work. I haven't read these papers, so please take my characterization of
them with a large grain of salt.
If you look at the particular pattern of stripes on a particular zebra, they are like finger
prints. They are unique to the particular zebra (more or less). Is the particular pattern
encoded in genes? Turing thought not. Turing showed thatthe kinds of patterns that we see
could actually be created by simple chemistry if we considered what was going on in the
neighborhood of each reaction was considered when looking at any particular reaction.

Again, I don't know the history of these ideas, but this is very much the kind of stuff that was
developed by the economist Thomas Schelling in the 1970s and presented to the public in a
book Micromotives and Macrobehavior. It was a way of seeing how lots of simple
interactions among simple elements could lead to remarkably complex patterns in the
system as a whole. A couple decades later this got some public attention under the buzzword
"emergence". But Turing was the one who showed how using a set of simple differential
equations modeling simple interactions, we could actually get the kinds of complex patters
that we see in some living things.

In summary
Turing was an absolutely brilliant mathematician. It is a mistake to look only at what he is
famous for among non-mathematicians. "Invented the concept of a computer" does not
communicate the mathematical genius and profundity of "On Computable Numbers". His
speculation on "Can Machines Think" is not a work of mathematics. But I hope that the
description above will help people understand why mathematicians hold Turing in such
high regard.

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