Alan Turing

📍2 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, London W9 1ER, United Kingdom

“I was born Alan Mathison Turing on the 23rd of June 1912 in Maida Vale, London, in a comfortable terraced house in a neighbourhood of Victorian mansion blocks, and my early childhood was peripatetic — my parents were posted to India and my brother and I were left in England with various foster families. It was not an unhappy childhood but it was an unsettled one, and I developed the independence and the inward orientation of someone who had learned early to find company in his own mind. Mathematics was always where I went when the outer world was confusing, and it never disappointed. I later lived and worked at Manchester and Bletchley and Princeton, but London — its particular combination of anonymity and civilisation — was always the city that felt most like home. I am proudest of the work at Bletchley that shortened the war, and most pained by what my country did to me afterwards.”

Sources: Hodges, A. Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), Burnett Books; Leavitt, D. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (2006), W.W. Norton; Turing, A. Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), Mind