“Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!””
John Greenleaf Whittier
The above quote seems horribly appropriate when considering the life and career of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician, one of the founders of modern computer science and head of the cryptograph team who broke two ciphers used by the Nazi forces and helped secure Allied victory in World War II. Yet despite all these accomplishments, Turing received a criminal conviction for his relationship with another man, leading to his suicide when he was only 41 years old. Although he has now be posthumously pardoned and recognised for his incredible mind and pivotal role in World War II, we are left wondering what he might have achieved if he had been accepted by society and continued his work into old age.[1]
Turing began his academic career in pure mathematics and derived an independent proof of the central limit theorem.[2] In 1934, he submitted a fellowship dissertation on the Gaussian Error function, winning Turing a three-year fellowship at Cambridge at the age of only 22.[3]
In 1936, Turing began working on the Entscheidungsproblem (roughly translated this means “decision problem”). This work led Turing to develop many ideas that are now foundational in computer science, including the concepts of a computer as a machine that is given instructions to carry out and can thus perform calculations, and the instructions that would be given to such a machine (today referred to as algorithms). In his work, Turing showed that there were certain mathematical problems that cannot be solved using algorithms.[4]
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Turing joined the government code-breaking department at Bletchley Park where he would decrypt first the Enigma code in 1941and then the more advanced Lorenz cipher in 1942.[5] For those interested in cryptograph, the Centre for Innovation for Mathematics Teaching have an excellent section on this topic (including exercises on the Enigma code and Lorenz ciphers).
https://www.cimt.org.uk/resources/codes/
After the War ended, Turing began working on the Automatic Computing Engine – a device widely considered to be the first digital computer.[6] During his time at Manchester University, he devised the Turing Test, a foundational concept in artificial intelligence that seeks to discern between the output of a computer and the responses of a human (and judge whether the person carrying out the test can tell the difference).[7] He also used the newly developed computing technology to devise a mathematical framework to explain how regular and symmetric patterns arise in nature.[8]
However, in 1951 Turing was convicted of gross indecency for his affair with another man (something that would remain illegal in the UK until 1967). He elected to have “chemical castration” as an alternative to a prison sentence but lost his security clearance (and hence his work in government cryptography) and was placed under police surveillance.[9]
In 1954, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
In the decades following Turing’s untimely death, laws and attitudes towards homosexuality have changed and Turing’s achievements have received long overdue attention. He was posthumously pardoned in 2013 and his image was used on the £50 note in 2021. Each year on June 23rd (Turing’s birthday), flowers are placed at the statue of Turing in Sackville Gardens in Manchester in an effort to remember Turing and to raise money for the charity Special Effect (a UK based charity that uses video games and technology to improve the lives of people with disabilities).[10] As the founder of Flowers for Turing, Dr Joe Reddington, explains “I think we should take every chance to celebrate people who changed the world for the better.”
To donate to Flowers for Turing, please click on the link below
https://equalitytime.github.io/FlowersForTuring/donate.html
[1] Hopefully it goes without saying that the tragedy of someone being persecuted to the point they take their own life far outweighs the loss of their contributes to science…but I’m going to say it anyway.
[2] https://statisticsbyjim.com/basics/central-limit-theorem/
[3] https://people.maths.bris.ac.uk/~mapdw/welch_proc_ems.pdf
[4] https://www.newscientist.com/people/alan-turing/#:~:text=Often%20considered%20the%20father%20of,the%20basis%20for%20artificial%20intelligence.
[5] https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/how-lorenz-was-different-from-enigma/
[6] https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=647
[7] https://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/theturingtest.html
[8] https://royalsociety.org/blog/2021/11/turing-theory-pattern-formation/
[9] https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/teach/alan-turing-creator-of-modern-computing/zhwp7nb
[10] https://equalitytime.github.io/FlowersForTuring/