Who Was Alan Turing?

Alan Turing is relatively unknown, but was pivotal in the Allies winning the Second World War, due to the fact that he invented the British Bombe, an ENIGMA machine, which was used to decode German messages.  An ENIGMA mchine is a very cpmlex means of sending messages in a code, the complexities of which are so vast, that the code should be virtually indecipherable.
Turing is often credited with inventing the ENIGMA machine, but this is not the whole story.  The ENIGMA machine was actually devised in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius.  What Turing did was invent a means of de-crypting the codes used by the Germans with their ENIGMA machines.   This was a major victory for the Allies in terms of gaining information from the Germans.
Turing lived from 1912-1954 and was a mathematician.  He was, to a large extent, ahead of his time, since he believed that machines such as the ENIGMA machine would one day be truly intelligent i.e. he foresaw the revolutionary role of computers, which had not actually been invented.

Alan Turing today received a posthumous apology from the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for the appalling way he was treated by the authorities after the Second World War.