This is interesting but not completely accurate. What is most mind-blowing, is that Turing machines were Turings approach to formalizing proofs as a means towar

This is interesting but not completely accurate. What is most mind-blowing, is that Turing machines were Turings approach to formalizing proofs as a means towards solving the Entscheidungsproblem. In fact he was successful in "solving" the problem, in that he proved the impossibility of solving it, later than Goedel, but in a much clearer way - Goedel encoded theorems using numbers in a quite crazy way. I also don't think Turing and Von Neumann can be given that much exclusive credit in inventing the computer, while they had huge impact, I think the idea of a computer was to some extent "in the air" and there were many people working on it concurrently, sometimes unaware of each other, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware