Alan Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912, the second of his parents' two sons. His father was a member of the British civil service in India, an environment that his mother considered unsuitable for her boys. So John and Alan Turing spent their childhood in foster households in England, separated from their parents except for occasional visits back home. Alan's loneliness during this period may have inspired his lifelong interest in the operations of the human mind, how it can create a world when the world it is given proves barren or unsatisfactory.

At 13 he enrolled at the Sherbourne School in Dorset and there showed a flair for mathematics, even if his papers were criticized for being "dirty," i.e., messy. Turing recognized his homosexuality while at Sherbourne and fell in love, albeit undeclared, with another boy at the school, who suddenly died of bovine tuberculosis. This loss shattered Turing's religious faith and led him into atheism and the conviction that all phenomena must have materialistic explanations. There was no soul in the machine nor any mind behind a brain. But how, then, did thought and consciousness arise?

After twice failing to win a fellowship at the University of Cambridge's Trinity College, a lodestar at the time for mathematicians from around the world, Turing received a fellowship from King's College, Cambridge. King's, under the guidance of such luminaries as John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, provided a remarkably free and tolerant environment for Turing, who thrived there even though he was not considered quite elegant enough to be initiated into King's inner circles. When he completed his degree requirements, Turing was invited to remain at King's as a tutor. And there he might happily have stayed, pottering about with problems in mathematical logic, had not his invention of the Turing machine and World War II intervened.

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