Tech world preps to honor 'Father of Computer Science' Alan Turing, as centenary nears

11.06.2012
Listening to the way people in the world of technology talk about Alan Turing, it's difficult to believe that the English computer scientist isn't more of a household name.

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"The man challenged everyone's thinking," says , Google's chief Internet evangelist, in an interview with Network World. "He was so early in the history of computing, and yet so incredibly visionary about it."

Cerf -- who is president-elect of the Association for Computing Machinery and general chair of that organization's effort to celebrate the upcoming 100th anniversary of Turing's birth on June 23 -- says that it's tough to overstate the importance of Turing's role in shaping the world of modern computing.

"Alan had such a broad impact on so many aspects of computer science," says Cerf. "The deep notion of computability is so fundamental to everything we do in computing."