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.
