Alan Turing
The close of Pride Month seems an apt time to talk about Alan Turing, inventor of the famed Turing Test for identifying independent intelligence in computers, who worked for the British code breakers in World War II, and was one of the leading figures who successfully cracked the secret German messages, a feat which played a considerable part in the victory over Hitler.
Turing was, however, a homosexual. After the war, he was arrested and convicted of “gross indecency.” He was promised to be spared prison, provided he agreed to allow himself to be injected with estrogens to “cure” his condition. Turing made the deal, but two years later, he killed himself by eating a poisoned apple.
After a group of scientists launched a movement to expunge his conviction and honor his name in his home country of England last year, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a posthumous apology to Turing on behalf of the British government. Turing was already honored in much of the rest of the world; for example, in America, the Association for Computing Machinery has presented the Turing Award, the field’s top award, since 1966.
Farah Mendlesohn says:
Thank you for this post.
There’s a lovely statue of Turing in Manchester.
June 28, 2010, 2:09 amMatthew X. Economou says:
The modern world owes a great deal to Turing for his theory of computation, which I would argue has significance on par with (if not greater than) his wartime work on cryptanalysis.
June 28, 2010, 9:38 amJohn Traylor says:
How very sad. It makes me wonder how many contributions to civilization have been lost to to unthinking prejudice.
June 28, 2010, 11:36 amPat says:
He worked here in Manchester for a while so we have a road (Alan Turing Way), part of the University (Alan Turing Building) and a statue of him sitting on a bench holding an apple in the Gay Village. Just for fun they put part of the inscription as if it were encoded by the Enigma Machine.
He went to the same school as my Dad.
June 28, 2010, 12:51 pmJolo says:
The company I work for has it’s meeting rooms named after famous engineers, scientists and the like. The closest room to me is the “Turing Room”
June 29, 2010, 5:17 pmTom Galloway says:
2012 has been declared “Alan Turing Year” in recognition of what would’ve been his 100th birthday. Personally, I’m hoping the Brits think to tie this into the 2012 Summer Olympics in London in a significant way, perhaps in the torch lighting method/ceremony.
July 1, 2010, 1:46 pmDanilo says:
I read somewhere that Apple’s old logo (rainbow apple with only a bite off) was a tribute to Turing’s life and death…
July 15, 2010, 8:35 amDavid says:
I’ve read a bit about Alan Turing.
I believe you could make a very VERY powerfull movie about his life around the time of WWII and his death, showing how as horrible as the Nazi’s where the “more civilized” nations of the West could stand to look in the mirror a bit at the time.
The fact that one of the men that saved us in WWII was driven to kill himself by those that depended on him is probably one of the most tragic stories ever.
I believe it could open up many people’s eyes.
October 9, 2010, 8:06 pm