100 years ago today, Alan Turing was born. He was undeniably one of the most important men who ever lived. He changed our world in so many ways, yet most people have never heard his name. He’s one of my favourite people in the entire world, and I have a lot of love for him (I think this is the third time I’ve written about him here). I actually see him as a sort of fatherly figure, because his work was so influential in my life. He invented the modern computer, he saved millions of lives during WWII, and he modernized our world. Every person on this planet should know his story.
Alan had an intensely creative mind. He was possibly the most intelligent man who ever lived. He was a mathematician and logician, who had a keen interest in the use of formal languages and algorithms. That gave him a natural talent for breaking codes and formulating mathematical proofs. Alan was also known for his personality quirks. He was extremely athletic – he could run marathons with ease, and when he met with other scientists in London, he’d often run the 40 miles it took to get there. He loved to run and bicycle, but he had terrible allergies. To remedy this, he’d sometimes wear a military-issue gas mask outside. The thought of Alan cycling to work in a suit and a gas mask is just priceless to me – I wish someone had photographed it.
When Alan was a teenager, he could understand advanced calculus before having been taught a single lesson. He understood Einstein’s work without needing any explanations. Mathematics came to him naturally, and that led to a successful college career at Cambridge and Princeton. After graduation in 1938, he immediately began working for a British code-breaking organization, as the threat of another World War began to grow. On September 3rd of the following year, Britain declared war on Germany. The next day, Alan reported for duty at Bletchley Park, the government’s headquarters for the deciphering of enemy codes.
Americans tend to forget the massive sacrifices made by the European Allies during World War II. Europe went to war in September 1939, but the US wouldn’t enter the war until December 1941, over two years later. Those two years were hell for Europe. After heavy fighting, France fell to the Axis powers, forcing British troops to evacuate. Shortly afterward, Germany began bombing Britain. During The Blitz, London alone was bombed on 57 consecutive nights. German forces dominated the land, the sea, and the air. Americans like to think that we “jumped in and saved the day”; but even after US forces joined the effort, the war wouldn’t end for another 4 years. And with the exception of Pearl Harbor, not a single attack or battle took place on US soil. Europe took the real toll of the war. The UK lost about three times more of its population than the US did, and it was even worse for other nations like France and Poland. If it hadn’t been for those early years of heavy combat, I doubt even the US involvement could have won the war.
One of the keys to Germany’s early success was the Enigma Machine – a highly advanced cryptography machine which could encrypt and decrypt coded messages. The Germans used them to communicate over war zones, and that secrecy gave them a huge advantage. Alan Turing took that as a personal challenge. He developed a device he called the Bombe – a machine that would find contradictions in formal languages to crack a code. Using logical proofs, it could determine the rotor settings of an Enigma machine when a code was created, allowing it to then be deciphered.
When the Bombe was completed, Alan immediately began work on the Hut-8, used to decipher German U-Boat codes. He then continued on with several similar projects until the war had been won. Most historians agree that the war could not have been won without Alan’s work. Without him, Hitler’s forces likely would have achieved global domination. And even if the Allies had been able to win, there’s no question that Alan’s work was able to hasten the victory and prevent casualties. He saved millions of lives, and he was instrumental in Hitler’s defeat - and he was only 27 years old when he began work on the Bombe. Unfortunately, his work would remain classified for decades – the world wouldn’t fully understand his importance until after his death.
By this point, we already have a man who deserves to be remembered forever. But Alan was just getting started. In his day, computers were very basic machines. The average computer took up an entire room, and it could only accept rudimentary commands. Alan understood the potential power of computers, so he began working on a theoretical Logical Computing Machine, now called a Turing Machine. In his unveiling of the concept, he described it as having “an infinite memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.” In short, this would be a machine that could theoretically process any algorithm. The Turing Machine was never meant to be a literal machine; rather, it was meant to explain how an electronic device could be made to handle complex languages using logic and rules. This would become the foundation of Computer Science, and it eventually became the template for every computer used today. Right now, you’re reading this column on a literal manifestation of a Turing Machine.
Alan also developed the Turing Test, a method for determining a machine’s aptitude for simulating intelligence. The Turing Test made Alan the father of artificial intelligence, and 50 years later it’s still widely used and debated among scientists. He was also hugely influential in introducing mathematical biology to the world. He was never content to stay in one place; he spent his entire adult life trying to take our species to places it had never been. He wasn’t doing it for fame, and he wasn’t doing it for money – he was doing it because he was the only man who could, and that thrilled him.
But throughout Alan’s amazing life, he had to keep one secret – he was gay, in an era that didn’t accept it. Alan was born just 12 years after Oscar Wilde’s persecution and death, and he understood the consequences of being openly gay. He was very careful to keep his secret for this reason. In 1952, Alan fell in love with a man named Arnold Murray. But Arnold betrayed Alan, and robbed his home. Arnold knew that Alan couldn’t go to the police without admitting his own homosexuality, so he assumed he could get away with it. However, he underestimated Alan’s sense of dignity. Alan went to the police, where he inevitably had to explain how Arnold had access to his home. Alan was arrested, and given a choice – prison, or chemical castration. Terrified of prison, Alan chose the latter.
The hormonal changes to his body had a devastating effect. His supremely athletic body became saggy and weary, and he was no longer able to run as he once could. His criminal charges made him ineligible for government security clearances, and he lost the career that had won the war. His friends and neighbors rejected him as some sort of pervert. In a matter of weeks, his life had fallen apart, and he fell into a deep depression.
Two years after being exiled from society, Alan committed suicide. In tribute to his favourite film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, he injected an apple with cyanide and took a bite. His body was found the next day, and a small, private funeral was held. Jack Good, one of Alan’s oldest friends, later said “it was a good thing the authorities hadn't known Turing was a homosexual during the war, because if they had, they would have fired him - and we would have lost.” Alan was soft-spoken and shy; even though he changed the world, he was never famous. And for those who did know about Alan, the sense of guilt brought by driving a genuine hero to his death made it difficult to talk about. And so his legend drifted into obscurity. Outside of the scientific community, few people know anything about him. But to the scientific world (most especially mathematicians and computer scientists), Alan is a national treasure. When Apple started making computers, they created a logo that paid tribute to Alan:
This logo is still used today. It’s one of the most famous images in the world now, but few people know what it means. Every time I see it, I think of Alan.
In 2009, the Prime Minister of Great Britain made a formal apology for what happened: “It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could well have been very different… The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely… While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly.”
It’s a good start. I hope one day soon, Alan’s incredible life will become more publicly known. It’s an amazing story that needs to be remembered. Every single one of us owes a debt to this man, and his death was an inexcusable tragedy.