Alan Turing was a British mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Turing was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He also made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, and philosophy.