There are heroes we’ve lost because of accidents, genetics, and whatever y’all are doing in Australia.
And then there are the heroes we lost because we hated them to death.
Today’s Moment of Science… The life and death of Alan Turing.
I’ve written about some extraordinarily smart people, even some legends, but few geniuses. Turing was a fucking genius in the way that he blinked new fields of science into life. He didn’t just understand mentally taxing subjects, he conjured them into existence.
His high school was focused on teaching the classics and not this frippery of numbers. Instructors more or less told his mother he’d never amount to anything if he kept faffing about with science. In order to get the math education he craved, he taught himself theoretical mathematics. As you do.
He met the person long thought to be his first love at this school, Christopher Morcom. He was another brilliant student who understood his interest in math in ways the other students didn’t. His untimely death in 1930 from bovine tuberculosis devastated Alan, who remained in touch with Christopher’s mother for years after his passing.
Turing then attended Cambridge University, publishing “On Computable Numbers With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in 1936 as a twenty-two year old. The Entscheidungsproblem, or “decision problem,” was referred to in the 1800s as the “fundamental problem of mathematical logic.” Given all the laws, truths, postulates, and axioms we know about math, there exists an algorithm that can decipher if a mathematical statement is provable or not. TL;DR, Turing had cranked out a working definition and rules for computability.
To do this, he’d drawn into life the ideas for a theoretical device, the Turing machine. It would carry out any programmable algorithm and tell you if a statement was true or false. He had set out to solve a math problem and by 22, he’d essentially drawn up the blueprints for modern computing. He could have stopped then and already been a legend.
By that age I was super stoked that I’d banged one of the Red Sox, so basically same.
Turing got his PhD at Princeton by the age of 25. Then he headed back to England because hoofuckingboy, Hitler was happening all over Europe.
Amongst other weapons of Germany’s war machine was the ability to send encrypted messages. Though the allied forces were able to intercept them, decoding them was a problem. The German Enigma machine encoded messages so securely that the cleverest of code breakers weren’t having much luck deciphering these with pen and paper.
During this time, Turing got to be a bit of a legend at Bletchley Park, home of the UK’s Government Code & Cypher School. He would cycle to work wearing a gas mask during the worst of allergy season. Boasting a marathon time that would nearly qualify him for the Olympics, sometimes he would run the forty miles to London for meetings. Though it didn’t work out on account of both of them being into dudes, he briefly got engaged to his bff and fellow code cracker, Joan Clarke.
Most importantly, working with a team of code crackers, he dealt a blow to the Germans with this ginormous contraption called the bombe. The behemoth would test every possible setting from the Enigma machine, slowly and methodically eliminating possible combinations until it spat out some “fuck these nazis” code. Turing was one of many heroes in WWII who stopped the world as we know it from ending.
In 1950, he published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, introducing the world to the Turing Test. This explored the concept that a machine could be advanced enough and programmed to appear indistinguishable from human intelligence. Along with still being influential today, artificial intelligence has not been able to pass the Turing test yet (this is disputed but it’s generally agreed that Eugene Goostman’s 2014 chatbot did not pass).
This story, unfortunately, does not come to a happy end. This should have a part two with decades more of Turing’s discoveries.
But in 1952, after all his service? He was prosecuted for indecency. That’s the nice way to say “we were terrible homophobic fuckheads back in the day,” and his crime was loving a man. He was sentenced to chemical castration. In 1954, his housekeeper found his body after he’d ingested a cyanide coated apple.
Alan Turing was dead, having taken his own life at the age of 41.
In 2013, after a campaign led by computer scientist John Graham-Cunning, he was granted a posthumous pardon. Graham-Cunning said of Turing, “He was a national treasure and we hounded him to his death.”
This has been your daily Moment of Science, hoping for so much better for this generation of LGBTQIA scientists.
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