Turing’s Thesis, which is actually a hypothesis, is this: Any computation carried out by mechanical means can be performed by a Turing Machine. A computer science law built on this thesis is this: A computation is mechanical if and only if it can be performed by a Turing Machine. That is, there is no machine that we are currently aware of that has greater computational power than a Turing Machine. Meaning that everything you do or can possibly do on your computer or any computer, real or imaginary, from streaming Glee’s season finale on Stagevu, to simulating water in a bath tub in Matlab, can be, theoretically speaking of course, done using a sufficiently long piece of tape, a read write head, a set of rules the read write head must follow, and a set of input and output symbols.
In fact, modern day CPUs are modeled after the Universal Turing Machine, which is a re-programmable Turing Machine capable of simulating any Turing Machine.
In 1952 he was arrested for being gay, and chose chemical castration over a jail sentence as punishment. Two years later he killed himself with a poisoned apple. (One biographer thinks he chose this method so that his mother could believe that it was an accident and not suicide. Other people think he was reenacting a scene from Disney's Snow White.) In 2009 Gordon Brown officially apologized for Turing's treatment.
His epitaph:
Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour those Waves which somehow Might
Play out God's holy pantomime
Maheen