The movie The Imitation Game focused on how mathematician Alan Turing broke the German “Enigma” code, a major contribution to the Allied victory in World War II. Those interested in artificial intelligence talk about the “Turing test,” the goal of making it impossible to tell whether a machine or a human being is responding to questions. But Turing’s most enduring contribution is not known so much. He wrote a paper about 0’s and 1’s and computable numbers that basically invented the concept of software.
From Joel Achenbach, What ‘The Imitation Game’ didn’t tell you about Turing’s greatest triumph – The Washington Post:
Turing’s greatest breakthrough wasn’t mechanical, but theoretical — that 1936 paper that Dyson was talking about. “On Computable Numbers,” written in England, was published in the proceedings of the London Mathematical Society after Turing arrived at Princeton, where he would spend two academic years earning a Ph.D.