Alan Mathison Turing was born in England in 1912. Like many talents who go on to great things, Turing showed his unbelievable intelligence from a very young age. Actually, by the time he was halfway through primary school, Turing's teachers had already realized he was a mathematical genius. He could do complex calculating in his head even though he had never been taught about it.
Fortunately, Turing was the opposite of Hawking, and he absolutely loved school. Proof of this is the extreme lengths he would go just to get to class. For example, on one occasion when there was a train strike, Turing even cycled 60 miles to attend. Now that's devotion!
However, in spite of Turin's scholarly attitude and his obvious genius, his teachers had their concerns about his future. This was because well-known schools in Britain like the ones Turing attended regarded the Classics, such as Latin and Greek as the most important, not subjects like maths and science. Turing's proud teachers even wrote letters to his parents asking them to persuade the young man to focus more on the Classics. Imagine how different the world might be if the young Turing had listened to his teachers! Thankfully, his love for all things scientific and mathematical meant there was no chance of that.
After finishing secondary school, Turing completed a degree in mathematics at King's College Cambridge, and then obtained his PhD from Princeton University in the USA. It was during these university years that he invented the Turing Machine, which is considered by many people to be the earliest version of a computer processing unit. It sounds unbelievable that anybody could have invented something which was similar to a computer in 1936. But that just shows how far ahead of his time Alan Turing was, even when he was still a young man.
