Alan Turing
Alan Turing was a British mathematician and computer scientist whose codebreaking work during World War II and foundational theories of computation helped shape modern computer science.
During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, where he played a key role in breaking Germany's Enigma code, work that historians credit with significantly shortening the war and saving countless lives.
Before the war, Turing had already laid theoretical groundwork for computer science with his concept of the 'Turing machine,' a theoretical model of computation that remains foundational to the field.
Despite his wartime contributions, Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality, then illegal in Britain, and died in 1954. He received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, and is now widely celebrated as a founding figure of computer science and artificial intelligence.