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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.
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.
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.