Information / Electronics & Computing

Turing Machine

Alan Turing shows mathematically what a computing machine can compute at all, and what it never can.

In “On Computable Numbers” (1936) Turing described a simple imaginary machine with a tape and a state table that can carry out any computable task (the universal machine). He also proved that some problems are unsolvable (the halting problem); Alonzo Church reached the same result by another route in 1936. This fixed the theory behind every later computer and every piece of software.