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Alan Turing, while a mathematics student at the University of Cambridge, was inspired by German mathematician David Hilbert’s formalist program, which sought to demonstrate that any mathematical problem can potentially be solved by an algorithm—that is, by a purely mechanical process. Turing interpreted this to mean a computing machine and set out to design one capable of resolving all mathematical problems, but in the process he proved in his seminal paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [‘Halting Problem’]” (1936) that no such universal mathematical solver could ever exist. In order to design his machine (known to ...(100 of 31391 words)