With the backing of John Maynard Keynes, he was elected a Fellow of King’s College in 1935, at the age of twenty-two. When the news reached his old school, the boys celebrated with a clerihew: “Turing / Must have been alluring / To get made a don / So early on.” With a stipend, no duties, and High Table dining privileges, he was free to follow his intellectual fancy. That spring, attending lectures in the foundations of mathematics, he was introduced to a deep and unresolved matter known as the “decision problem.” A few months later, during one of his habitual runs, he lay down in a meadow and conceived a sort of abstract machine that settled it in an unexpected way.Jim Holt. "Code-Breaker: The life and death of Alan Turing" The New Yorker, February 6, 2006.
And so for day 1549
11.03.2011