Alan Turing is mainly remembered for inventing the Turing Machine. With this device, symbols are moved around on a strip of tape according to specific rules. It had an infinite memory capacity, and was used to develop computer science and provide a model for the calculations that computers can do. It is largely because of this device that Turing is sometimes called the father of the modern computer; but he was involved in many other ways too, in developing early computer science and artificial intelligence.

He also played a very important role as a codebreaker in the Second World War, and was instrumental in breaking the Enigma code used by the Germans. After the war he created an early design for a computer that could store programs (the ACE) before working on the Turing Machine. In later years he became more interested in the field of mathematical biology.