Telegraph: In the 1930s Alan Turing wrote a paper describing a machine that laid the mathematical groundwork for modern computing. Recently, Turing’s concept of a " universal computing machine” received 18% of the more than 50 000 votes in an online poll held as part of the UK’s National Science and Engineering Week. Second place went to the British Motor Corp’s Mini, and third place to x-ray crystallography, whose invention and applications led to several British Nobel Prizes. In a separate similar poll to choose “the innovation most likely to shape the 21st century,” voters selected ionic liquid chemistry.