To all you computer geeks, today is the 100th birth anniversary of the Father of Computing Alan Turing.

Some history if you don't know much about Alan Turing,

In the famous 1900 speech by Hilbert on 23 unsolved problems at a Paris mathematics conference, Hilbert had asked if there exists or can be devised a "stepwise process" to solve the Diophantine equation. Essentially he was referring to what we know today as an "algorithm", but the concept of an algorithm did not exist then.

It was Alan Turing, a British mathematician and code breaker, who formalized the ideas of "computing" and "algorithm". This was in the 1930s, primarily through his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" published in 1936. He formalized the idea of a "computing machine" comprising of an infinite tape, a read/write head and "language" of 0s and 1s. We call this the Turing Machine. This was just a formal mathematical concept but a truly revolutionary one on which the whole field of computing now stands. From then till now, we have indeed come a very long way. Beginning from Von Neumann's stored procedure concept to EDVAC and ENIAC to modern day computers and the ideas of computation.

Alan Turing was conceived in Chhatrapur Orissa (British India), but the parents moved to London, and Turing was born on 23 June there. Turing went to King's College, Cambridge, and later to Princeton for his PhD. His ideas of computing were developed while at Princeton. He later returned to Britain and was crucial in breaking German codes for the British during the Second World War.

In 1952, Turing was accused of homosexuality, which were both illegal as well as a social stigma then in London. Turing was convicted under law and was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment. In 1954, Turing committed suicide by consuming cyanide injected into an apple.

In 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) decided to give the Turing Award in memory of Alan Turing every year to a person for technical contributions in computing. This award is considered to be the Nobel Prize equivalent in the field of computing. In 1999, the Time Magazine named Turing as the '100 most important people of the 20th century'. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology on behalf of the British Government and called the treatment to Turing "appalling".

BBC has come out with a week long special programme on Alan Turing to commemorate the 100th birthday of Alan Turing starting from Turing Award winner Vinton Cerf's remembrance of Alan Turing. Take a look, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18541715

You can of course read more about Turing from Wikipedia and all over the Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

Also check out Google's doodle for today!