TURING CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION at PRINCETON (May 10-12, 2012)
A sincere thanks to our speakers, to all who attended, and to all who helped to make Princeton's Turing Centennial such a success. Links to videos of all of the Turing lectures are available on this site as well as on Youtube (search #turingprinceton).
Alan Turing, universally recognized as the "father of computer science," studied at Princeton in the late 1930s and earned a Ph.D. in 1938. The passing of the torch from the mathematicians Godel and Church to the computer scientist Turing opened the door for an understanding of what is possible with computation and the development of the computational infrastructure that surrounds us today. Turing also originated research in artificial intelligence and played a decisive role as a cryptanalyst during the second world war.
Turing was born in 1912. The Princeton Turing Centennial Celebration, held May 10-12, 2012, honored Turing's time at Princeton, the pivotal role that his thesis played in the evolution of computer science, and the broad reach of his work. Turing was as important as Einstein for 20th century science; it could be argued that Turing's impact on society today was greater than Einstein's. In the video below, Andrew Appel, chair of the computer science department and Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science, discusses Turing's time at Princeton and his legacy.