The life and achievements of Alan Turing - the mathematician, codebreaker, computer pioneer, artificial intelligence theoretician, and gay/cultural icon - are being celebrated to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on 23 June.
To mark the occasion the BBC has commissioned a series of essays to run across the week, starting with this overview of Turing's legacy by Vint Cerf.
His is a story of astounding highs and devastating lows. A story of a genius whose mathematical insights helped save thousands of lives, yet who was unable to save himself from social condemnation, with tragic results. Ultimately though, it's a story of a legacy that laid the foundations for the modern computer age.
In 1936, while at King's College, Cambridge, Turing published a seminal paper On Computable Numbers which introduced two key concepts - "algorithms" and "computing machines" - that continue to play a central role in our industry today.
Computing before computers
He is remembered most vividly for his work on cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park during World War II, developing in 1940 the so-called electro-mechanical Bombe used to determine the correct rotor and plugboard settings of the German Enigma encryptor to decrypt intercepted messages.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this work for the Allies in their conduct of the war.
After the war, Turing worked on the design of of the Automatic Computing Engine (Ace) at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and in 1946, he delivered a paper on the design of a stored program computer.
His work was contemporary with another giant in computer science, John von Neumann, who worked on the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (Edvac).
Ace and Edvac were binary machines and both broke new conceptual ground with the notion of a program stored in memory that drove the operation of the machine.
Storing a program in the computer's memory meant that the program could alter itself, opening up remarkable new computing vistas.
Other essays include
The codebreaker who saved 'millions of lives' by Prof Jack Copeland
Jack Copeland is professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has also built the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, an extensive online resource.
Is he really the father of computing? by Prof Simon Lavington
Simon Lavington is the author of Alan Turing and his Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers and a former professor of computer science at the University of Essex.
The experiment that shaped artificial intelligence by Prof Noel Sharkey
Gay codebreaker's defiance keeps memory alive by Andrew Hodges
Andrew Hodges is a tutorial fellow in mathematics at Wadham College, University of Oxford, and author of Alan Turing: the enigma.
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