On Saturday, British mathematician Alan Turing would have turned 100 years old. It is barely fathomable to think that none of the computing power surrounding us today was around when he was born.

Alan Turing

But without Turing's work, computers as we know them today simply would not exist, Robert Kahn, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols that run the Internet, said in an interview. Absent Turing, 'the computing trajectory would have been entirely different, or at least delayed,' he said.

For while the idea of a programmable computer has been around since at least 1837 -- when English mathematician Charles Babbage formulated the idea of his analytical engine -- Turing was the first to do the difficult work of mapping out the physics of how the digital universe would operate. And he did it using a single (theoretical) strip of infinite tape.

'Turing is so fundamental to so much of computer science that it is hard to do anything with computers that isn't some way influenced by his work,' said Eric Brown, who was a member of the IBM team that built the 'Jeopardy'-winning Watson supercomputer.
A polymath of the highest order, Turing left a list of achievements stretching far beyond the realm of computer science. During World War II, he was instrumental in cracking German encrypted messages, allowing the British to anticipate Germany's actions and ultimately help win the .