Christina Giallombardo
Alan Mathison Turing’s life was one filled with genius, innovation and secrets, all of which culminated in an untimely and tragic death. Turing was a mathematician, seen as the founding father of computers with his invention of ‘Turing Machines’. He was also gay at a time when being gay was illegal.
Alan Turning was born on 23rd June 1912 in London and was left to live with family friends at the age of one when his mother and father moved to India for work. From a young age, he was always preoccupied with following his own ideas in school, producing his own solutions to problems rather than following the teacher’s methods.
His naturally inquisitive mind led him to read about quantum mechanics in Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World and Einstein’s papers on relativity. Because of this, he found it difficult to fit in at public school. Turing only becoming close to one boy, Christopher Morcom, who tragically died only a few years after their meeting, leaving Turing devastated.
Turing essentially described a modern computer before technology had reached a point where construction was a realistic proposition
He went on to study mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1931 after taking the test twice in order to win a scholarship. In 1933 he turned his attention to mathematical logic, and with the rise of Hitler in Germany, he also joined anti-war movements, although he never became radicalised like many members did.
As a fellow at King’s College, he went on to have many achievements in probability theory. In 1936 he published On Computable Numbers, a paper which introduced what is now called ‘Turning Machines’. It was a remarkable feat as Turing essentially described a modern computer before technology had reached a point where construction was a realistic proposition.
Having previously been contracted by the Government Code and Cypher School, when war was declared in 1939, he moved to Bletchley Park where they worked full-time on breaking the German Enigma Code.
The notorious Enigma Code was believed to be unbreakable. There were 103 sextillion (103 followed by 21 zeros) possible ways to encode a message. The settings were reset every day at midnight, meaning it was impossible to manually test every combination in the 24 hours they had before the settings once again changed.
It is believed he went on to save 14 to 21 million lives
What Alan Turning realised was that the key to breaking the Enigma code was his beloved ‘Turning Machine’, which he built alongside fellow codebreaker Gordon Welchman, and named ‘the Bombe’. They used the Bombe to decipher the phrase ‘heil Hitler’ which was used at the end of every German message, and hence cracked the rest of the code.
The first code was broken in January 1940, and it is believed he went on to save 14 to 21 million lives and shortened the war by more than two years.
The harder Enigma code used by the German navy was not broken until 1941. When the German’s turned to use more complex code in 1942 and 1943, his ideas became of great importance in the effort to break the code.
Following the end of the war, he turned his studies to neurology and physiology, but he never forgot about computers and continue to write code for programming them. Surprisingly, he also became an athlete of nearly Olympic standard.
In 1950 he published Computing Machinery and Intelligence in Mind, a paper which captured his brilliantly inventive mind and seemed to foresee the rise of computer development. He also proposed the Turning Test, something people still use today to determine whether a computer can be intelligent.
It was in 1952 that his life took a drastic turn. Consensual homosexual acts in England and Wales were only legalised in 1967 with the Sexual Offenses Act, so when Turing’s homosexual affair was found out and he was blackmailed, he elected to report the details of the affair to the police himself and was consequently arrested. He was tried as a homosexual on 31 March 1952, offering no defence as there was nothing wrong with his actions.
He also went on to experience homophobia in nearly every aspect of his life
When he was found guilty, he was given the option of either going to prison or taking oestrogen injections for a year. He chose the latter in hopes to continue his academic research.
He was completely open with his sexuality, but due to the Official Secrets Act, he was forbidden from talking about it, giving him further unhappiness. He also went on to experience homophobia in nearly every aspect of his life, transforming from someone highly respected and revered to being mistrusted.
He continued to work for the decoding operation at Bletchley Park which became the new basis for decoding and intelligence work at GCHQ, but after being outed, he lost his security clearance, and many became worried that he would become a security risk as he had a complete knowledge of the work going on at the GCHQ. Even his foreign visitors were investigated by the police.
On 7th June 1954, two years after being convicted of being homosexual, he was found dead next to a half-eaten apple laced with cyanide. He was only 41 years old. Although it was concluded to be suicide, there are many theories conspiring that he was murdered.
Alan Turning predicted the rise of computers before they were even a viable creation and saved millions of lives. The homophobic attitudes in Britain caused his life to have a tragic end, but despite this, he lived the remainder of his life with pride in who he was and never apologised for being gay.
Christina Giallombardo
Featured Photo by Kleer001 from Flickr. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
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