Theirstory 3/3 - A great hero

To finish off, Theirstory, I want to talk about a small hero of mine and of a recent campaign to get him on the £50 note. I want to talk about Alan turning. An extraordinary man with an extraordinary brain. But why is he one of my hero’s? As well as being a famous homosexual, Turning was also believed to have Aspergers syndrome and although this had set me down for most of my life, hearing of Alan turnings success and for what he did and his heroic acts gives me faith in my own actions.

But here is a small overview of Alan Turning (If you haven’t watched imitation Game):

Alan Turing was born in Paddington, London on June 23, 1912. His family were middle-class and well-off. He was fascinated with science from an early age and showed precocious talent, especially in the areas of chemistry and mathematics. He attended Sherborne Public School and then King's College, Cambridge where he studied mathematics. His areas of interest at Cambridge were probability theory and mathematical logic. It was at Cambridge that he first conceptualised the Universal Turing Machine, an idea that was to evolve into the modern theory of computing. He has been referred to as the father of the computer. He worked on a cipher machine at Princeton University between 1936 and 1938. He worked for the British Government during World War II with the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. He was ultimately the key player in deciphering the German 'Enigma' code used by its submarines during the war. After the war he took up a post in Manchester University where he continued to work on ideas of artificial intelligence. He was arrested and charged for homosexual activity in 1952 and underwent a course of oestrogen therapy. He committed suicide in 1954. He was regarded as being socially aloof and eccentric by colleagues and friends. He was interested in mathematics, chemistry and logic from an early age, to the exclusion of other activities.

Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was never fully recognized in his home country during his lifetime due to his homosexuality which was then a crime in the UK.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Counterfactual history is difficult with respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war. But at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives

After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

In summary, Alan Turning was an amazing man that never got recognized because of what he was born as. He saved millions, only for those millions to kill him by driving him to suicide because they disagreed with what he was.