Alan Turing: A Genius Who's Suicide Brought An End To a Bright and Important Life

Alan Matheson Turing was a British scientist and mathematician whose work with computers in the 1930's and 1940's helped lay the ground work for the computer age and whose efforts in intelligence during World war 2 proved vital for the defeat of the Nazi's.
He was born in London on June 23 1912 and educated at Cambridge in England and Princeton in the U.S. In a paper he wrote in 1936 called "On Computable Numbers", while he was still a graduate student, he introduced the ideas and concepts of a theoretical computing device that became known as the Turing machine. It is considered one of the earliest forerunners of the modern digital computer.
During World war 2, Turing worked as a cryptographer and through his work actually broke the secret German enigma code which allowed the British and Americans to decypher secret German transmissions throughout the war. He discovered patterns in the German code that were repeticious and through analysis and deduction uncovered and revealed the secret language of the code.
After the war he turned some of his attentions to the study of artificial intelligence which again was some of the earliest work in forming many of the technological advancements we all are familiar with today.
He lived his last years in personal controversy. Turing was a homosexual and the revelation of this fact was a devastation to him both on a personal level and for his career. The entire matter drove him into a deep depression. He committed suicide on June 7th 1954 by poisoning himself with cyanide. He was only 41.