Alan Turing is the Bombe

Born on June 23, 1912 in London, England, Alan Turing began a life of studying mathematics.  His college studies began at the University of Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship and recommended to publish his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers" under the mathematician-logician Alonzo Church.  The two two had written of similar theories, and in the same year Turing went to study his Ph.D. at Princeton as directed by Church.  This is where it all began for Turing, but his real timeline of the contributions he made to computer science doesn't begin until his hypothetical development of the Turing machine.  It is essentially a mathematical model that reduces the logical structure of any computing device to its necessities.  Turing's next great leap came when the device know as the Bomba, a machine used to decode the German Enigma, was rendered useless once the German's changed their operating procedures.  Turing came in and designed the Bombe; a different machine used for decoding that was so ingenious it kept the Allies supplied with information for the rest of the war.  Turing was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire at the war's end to recognize him for his astounding work.  As if this wasn't enough, Turing went on to design the Automatic Computing Engine for the National Physical Laboratory in 1945.  This was the first relatively complete specification of a digital computer.  

If I was to be previously asked who Alan Turing was, I wouldn't have the slightest clue. Yet, here I am using a machine that he was such an important pioneer for.  I doubt than many people know of the numerous contributions this man made to machines that are used in our daily lives, or of his incredible intelligence, but Alan Turing definitely needs to be recognized.