The announcement of ‘The Alan
Turing institute,’ got me thinking about the legendary genius. Who was he, how
did he live his life and what was his legacy?
Anybody who readers the OliverRawlings blog knows that I have a major interest in technology. The way
technology changes our world with every new discovery, every practical
application, fascinates me. That’s why I’ve long been interested in the life
and times of Alan Turing.
His name has entered popular
discourse in recent years due to his personal life. Alan Turing was gay in a
time where it was illegal to be gay in Britain, and got caught. He was tried,
convicted and chemically castrated in 1952. He died from cyanide poisoning at
the age of 42 in 1954.
This injustice has led in recent
times to a campaign to strike down Turing’s 1952 conviction for homosexuality, based on both
the fact that it is now no longer illegal and on the great work he did that
changed the world forever. He received a posthumous royal pardon. What was that
great work?
Essentially, Turing was a
mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He
is perhaps most famous as being a significant contributor to the moderncomputer, through his ‘Turing Machine.’ This means that he’s basically regarded
as the father of modern computer science.
The implications of this are
enormous. Think about how much the computer has contributed to our world. So
much modern technology depends on computer science, that without it, this world
would still be stuck in the 19th Century. Forget smartphones and
laptops, we never even would have got the basic computer.
This wasn’t Turing’s only
contribution to the world in his lifetime. During the Second World War, he
worked at Bletchley Park, the government’s infamous code breaking headquarters.
He was vital to the effort to develop the Enigma machine, the device which
enabled the allies to understand and manipulate coded Nazi messages.
Again, the magnitude of this work
on the modern world is astounding. Have you ever read one of those dystopic
novels about how the world went to hell in a hand basket because the Nazi’s won
the Second World War? Yeah… Alan Turing
had a large role in stopping that.
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