Alan Turing: Genius, Patriot, Victim

Oh, there we go. David Fieldhouse,

as David Evans has racked Culley, David has arrived

so we can begin. We have several visitors,

including several from the mathematics department who are usually not with us on a

Friday afternoon. We’d like to welcome them and several others. It would

be unfair of me to specify individuals, but we’re very glad to have

such a good turnout. I will actually read my description of

Bob King because these lectures, as you know, are now broadcast and they’re

sometimes picked up by the BBC. So they’re heard throughout the world.

And for this reason, we need a slightly more formal introduction than it would be if

I were to ad lib about Bob King putting the government department into receivership

without in the English department into two and so on

during the question session. This would be welcome. They will not be welcome.

No way. Especially Miss Walter Wetzel’s

this afternoon. He would be here in his normal chair. He has attended the British studies

group for decades, and he had the same background as Bob King. In other words, he

was a mathematician before he went on to German literature. Unfortunately,

a few hours ago, Walter fell and broke his hip and is therefore not

able, obviously, to be with us. Bob King is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

He’s spent his career at the University of Texas at various times. He was

the Rappaport chair of Jewish Studies, professor of linguistics, Germanic

languages and Asian Studies, and a member of the Academy of

Distinguished Teachers. He was the founding dean of the College of Liberal Arts,

a position he occupied from 1976 to 1993.

Virtually two decades. And I think this holds a record at the University of

Texas. He will talk to us this afternoon about Alan Turing

and the code breaking machine. And this is a lecture that everyone has been looking

forward to for a very long time. Bob?

Well, thank you very much. The

Roger had asked me to say something about Walter Wetzel’s, who, as Roger pointed

out, would normally be sitting right over there, but he can’t be here today. We just

learned walking in here this afternoon from Dagmar that he broke his hip.

Walter and I go back a very long way. I came to Texas in sixty five,

nineteen sixty five. He came came a year or two later

and we we were both in the German department. I was teaching medieval German

literature in those days and he was teaching classical German

literature, Gerta and Schiller and we became friends almost immediately. We did

a lot of things together in those intervening years. But here he has been

a mainstay not only in attendance, but in

the financially of British studies. He’s always been very, very generous.

And we, Roger wanted to recognize him. Those of you who

know British studies in its current format would not have recognized it in the

early days when Rodgers created it. It was relatively

small. You never knew how many people were going to be there. Sherry, you had to pay for yourself,

which was one of the first things I thought I could do something about as Dean.

So I started paying for the sherry. Roger kept on collecting, didn’t tell other people,

but it was a different thing. And I am very glad that I had something

to do with setting it up on a more permanent status. It wouldn’t be here, though, without our fearless

leader, Roger Lewis and his persistence

an uphill battle some of the time. But look what it’s become now.

I want to talk today about Alan Turing. If

I were addressing here an audience, let’s say, of computer scientists,

I wouldn’t need to say who Alan Turing was. That would be probably

the first name if they gave them one of these psychological tests, computer science.

What do you think of first Alan Turing’s name would be one of the first, if not the first,

that would come up, John, for Norman, who was a Hungarian mathematician. Brilliant.

Extraordinary. Who died actually quite young at Princeton

would be a second if I were talking to mathematicians. Alan Turing would need no introduction,

as they say. Let me just say a little bit about him here. For those of you who may not know

that much about him. He was British, of course. He was born

in 1912. He went to Cambridge. I’ll be talking about most of this here

in my paper. And early on, he was recognized

as brilliant. The he became a fellow of King’s

College, Cambridge, when he was in his early 20s.

And then the war came on and he was immediately

put to work by the British government in its cipher and code breaking operation

at Bletchley Park. The big riddle was the German Enigma machine,

which kind of looks like a typewriter, but it was really state of the art and considered

unbreakable. The Germans in particular thought it was unbreakable. It

wasn’t. But to the end, they believed that no one could break this because of the

complexity of the Turing of the Enigma machine. Alan

Turing was not the only person responsible for doing all that code breaking work,

but he was the name most people associate with it today.

And after the war, he established his reputation, though more

in low key way. He didn’t go back to Cambridge as a mathematician,

as a brilliant mathematician. Now, let me tell you his story, because part of it is,

is a really terrible story. And that’s part of what I wanted to talk about in my essay

in 1950s. Life was looking pretty good. Alan Turing. He was coming

to be recognized as the most brilliant mathematician. Britain

had produced in the mid 20th century, and his wartime work in Breaking the Enigma

was still classified, which delayed his recognition as a mathematician.

But he was known by those who mattered by Winston Churchill, for example, as the major

contributor to the hugely successful code breaking operation at

Bletchley Park. And as an extraordinary mind by John for Norman,

generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his of his time,

there was a movie that came out five years ago called The Infinity Game,

and it had Benedict Cumberbatch playing Turing. I liked

the movie. It’s the way all movies are. It plays fast and loose with

a lot of the facts that I’ll be talking about today.

But Cumberbatch is one of my favorite actors anyway. And I he really can’t do anything badly

where I’m concerned. And I thought he did a good job is presenting, touring

after treading water during the funding uncertainties of postwar England.

He decided not to return to his fellowship at King’s College, instead

taking what was presented as a cutting edge assignment involving computers and

mathematical biology at the University of Manchester. It wasn’t the perfect

job, but Turing was easy going and things like that give him some toys,

like a computer or a chess puzzle, and a few congenial people

to pal around with, talk to, let him practice is running and he was

generally content. Four years later, in 1954,

touring at night and alone dipped half an apple in cyanide,

eight most of it, and died. They found his body the next day.

He was just this side of 43 years old. In my

earlier life as a mathematician and computer programmer at Cape Canaveral, I had

known who Turing was, you couldn’t help knowing that in those early days

where you had languages like COBOL Down, it looks like you’re reading about ancient history

and you are to some extent COBOL Fortran based to arithmetic zeros

and ones machine language programing. I knew about that, but I knew

Turing was, but I didn’t know how he had died until much later. I still

flinch at the tragedy, the sadness of it all. This modern variant of Socrates

and the hemlock. What had happened was that Turing, a homosexual,

an unapologetic about it, had been charged with gross indecency

under Section Eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the

act that had put Oscar Wilde in prison, in Redding jail.

Turing was given probation with the proviso that he submit for treatment

by a qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal

Infirmary. In little words, Turing was sentenced to a form of

chemical castration, which was called organo therapy, thought

at the time to be a cure for homosexuality. Electric shock treatment

was also touted as a cure. The side effects were brutal and

humiliating. And Turing decided apparently that life was not worth

living. Many issues intersect in the Turing

case genius homosexuality. The British class system,

English public schools. Oxbridge snobbery and bureaucratic infighting.

And the personal Turing always had a dark side. From his earliest days onward,

that could never be completely concealed. England had vicious penalties against

homosexuality between males more explicitly than between females.

Queen Victoria spoke for her country of shopkeepers when she was told of lesbians

that they existed. And she asked. But what on earth do they do?

She didn’t have much imagination. Obviously, Queen Victoria,

most European countries had harsh laws, as did America and Canada. France was

the exception, which is why so many upper-class Englishmen took their holidays across

the English Channel. Two to 10 years in prison was the normal sentence

for a morals offense, though until 1861, the death penalty

was still on the books. Homosexuality obviously pinched

some existential nerve in the psyche of the English middle class, and the laws

were enforced right down through the 1950s. Nothing changed until the Wolfenden

report of 1957, which recommended that homosexual behavior between

consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offense.

The Wolfenden report eventually led to the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act of

But that wasn’t Alan Turing’s world. He was born in 1912

into what George Orwell described as his own social class,

the lower upper middle class turin’s father, who me

like got along with very well with his father, was largely absent, mostly in

India. He could have wished for a different mother, but she wasn’t completely bad as

mothers go. She worshiped him, even if there was a peculiar distance

between them. She described him in her memoirs after his death as a strange

study and light and shade. I hope my mother, she’s

restless, so would never have said that of me. Children from Turing’s class,

the lower upper middle class were expected to attend public that is, private

schools and on the whole expensive schools, which usually meant going for a scholarship

or well, got one to Eton. Touring had more trouble. Lattin was

his bugaboo, but eventually he got a scholarship to attend Sherbourne College,

a mid to upper ranked public school in Dorset. One of whose old

boys is the spy novelist John le Carre Ray. Turing had most

of the usual genius problems, plus some that were uniquely his own.

He wasn’t very good academically, but made up for it in what Sherbourne called the

sciences. He detested the collective sports, rugby

and all that and Cannings that made up so pard large apart of the

sadistic undertow of the English public school. He became a serious

runner and remained one up until the very end. Almost the end.

He almost qualified for the 1948 British Olympic marathon team.

He claimed that he became a fast runner so that he would never have to near be near

a ball that was thrown at him and thus have to do something with the thing.

And I totally sympathize. No matter what the sport, I was always picked last

and my brother was always picked first

by his last year’s in-shore born. However, Turing’s affection for the place had grown.

He had made friends, some of them for life, and he realized as soon as

he understood anything about himself at all, that he was attracted to boys,

not girls. He was homosexual and almost mathematical about it.

Some men are attracted to women, generalizes to some men, or attracted

to men. Q.E.D. elected a fellow of King’s College,

Cambridge at the young age of 22 in 1935. He had written a paper

on computable numbers with an application to the and Dong’s poll blame.

The decision problem that Girdle and other great mathematicians had worked on

that after a slow beginning made World-Class mathematicians like John Finn Norman sit up

and take notice. This paper establishes a fundamental principle of theoretical

computer science and more importantly, of software engineering. There is

no out algorithm that can prove that any other algorithm terminates.

It sounds straightforward sort of, but it took a genius to think of that.

Turing was not universally acknowledged yet as a mathematical genius of the first

order that would come later. But he knew at good he was, and he knew his time would come

to use a phrase of our day that he would have detested as I do. He was comfortable

in his own skin. That applies particularly to his homosexuality,

a preference that was easy to satisfy. King’s College. Many of the dons

were gay, as were many of the students, and an Oxford or Cambridge College

has always been a refuge, a shelter from the real world. He

was a product of that wondrous alchemy by which England used to take middle

class types with brains, give them a scholarship to a good public

school, to an Oxbridge college, and then turn out well. An Alan Turing

or George Orwell. A future prime minister or a servant of the empire.

Turing and outlasted the Canning’s and humiliations dealt out by an English public

school and came out of it with wounds but not display a bling

and with a few lifetime friends and not the slightest disposition to write an essay.

As Orwell did, entitled with heavy irony, such such were

the joys. Orwell and Turing remain two of my dwindling number

of culture heroes, or well, as an Etonian in his school uniform.

Well, the thing simply cannot be imagined, nor Turing in his.

After a few uncertain moves, Turing had been accepted into King’s College. King’s

College wasn’t his first choice. Trinity was. But Turing never really cared much

about things like that. He just plowed ahead wherever he was, and Kings turned out

to be the right choice for him because of its eminence in mathematics.

He wasn’t Club Bull, as the Brits put it. I can hardly imagine him standing

comfortably around in his gown before in the Commons, before high table

sipping sherry, as we do here today. Being clever and witty, smart.

Passing the port the right direction at dessert. But he would have put up with it

because he was basically a nice guy up to a point, and he knew that he was at the

right place. Finally, King’s College. For one thing, he could be a sex centric

and bizarre and his behavior as he wanted to be. Cambridge was a master work

of eccentricity, especially among its mathematicians.

Its leading light. G.H. Hardy was cricket crazy,

and he said never to have missed a Test match at Lord’s cricket grounds.

Hardy had been sent a famous letter by the self-taught but impoverished Indian

mathematician Ramanujan asking for support. The theorems

that Ramanujan offered were so compelling that Hardy concluded I had

never seen anything in the least like them before. A single look

at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician

of the highest class and in a characteristic hearty flourish, she added.

They must be true because if they were not true, no one would have the imagination

to invent them. There’s a great movie about

Hardy and Ramanujan. You may have seen it. The man who knew Infinity. Jeremy

Irons played Hardy and they

did a pretty good job there of presenting the thing.

We had a British study session once on Ramanujan. I remember that Jim Vic and Steve Weinberg

were up here with me. I guess that was it. Rwanda, John Centenary. That would have

been about right. And we talked about him and he was truly great mathematician in number

theory. He was eccentric and slightly bizarre, but he’s really

intelligent. One time, Hardy visited Ramanujan in the hospital

and commented to him that he had driven over in the taxi cab. No. 1729.

And being British and clever, Hardy added that the number seemed to him

a rather dull one. No amount of John replied.

It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum

of two cubes in two different VSS. One of the reasons

I fled my career as a mathematician for easier fields to plow

like linguistics is stories like that one. Great

mathematicians emit an otherworldly glow of intellect. It’s almost extraterrestrial.

The Hardy Ramanujan collaboration and No Theory is one of the most famous and original in mathematics.

It ended, sadly, in a way that reminds me a little bit of Turing the homosexuality played.

Nothing had nothing to do with it. Ramana John fell ill of a mysterious wasting

ailment, which probably was tuberculosis. That was the clinical diagnosis,

but it probably was something more akin to loneliness, isolation and starvation

as a Brahman of the highest order. He was poor, but he was a very high caste.

The things don’t line up that way. It’s not if you’re rich, you can you can

be a Brahmin or you can be anything, but if you’re a Brahmin, you’re not necessarily rich as

a Brahmin. He could eat only what he himself or another Brahmin

could cooked. And there were not enough Brahmans nor enough pukka Indian

food in Cambridge to keep him healthy. He returned to India and died

in 1920, aged 32. Turing was definitely odd.

He held up his trousers by string, wore his pajamas under his sports

coat, and he affected a teddy bear. Shades of Sebastian Flight

and Brideshead Revisited named Porgy during tutorials

touring often propped Porgy up by the fire and greeted his students with Porgy

is very studious this morning. Touring once showed up for a tennis match,

wearing nothing but a raincoat. Then there was the voice, high pitched

and likely to stall in mid-sentence with an thing

like that. And the word when it came could signal anything from a polysyllabic

monstrosity to a wild scheme or a rude suggestion.

Apart from the voice, what people remembered most about Turing’s were his hands

with odd ridges on his fingernails, never cleaned or cut.

Something of the or about him? No doubt.

Odd is all of this might have been outside college gates. It was hardly noticed inside Cambridge.

Some of the older dons may have looked down their noses at Turing and his personal habits,

but the undergraduates liked him. Above all, he was not a snob and that’s refreshing

for an Oxbridge college. And that was refreshingly novel. Also, he liked

to talk to them about mathematics and just about anything else. Books running.

Whatever. Though he never talked about his love life with the students.

War came in 1939, just as Turing’s research career was about to take

flight. When war was declared, Turing announced very simply that his patriotic

duty was to join the war effort. What do you want me to do? Britain

wasn’t going to make the same tragic mistake that it made in the First World War

when everybody was subject to conscription. Budding scientists, writers,

painters and poets alike were sent to France and Gallipoli to end up as

cannon fodder. A generation of talents died in stinking,

putrid trenches. Or like Rupert Brook, who wrote the famous war point,

The Soldier of Sunstroke, T.S. Eliot got it right. The 1920s

were a wasteland. Indeed. The military is known for making

ridiculous assignments of its personnel. They saw my two

math degrees and put me to work as a clerk typist

in a miracle of good sense. Turing was recruited to work on code breaking at the

British Center, recently established then in Bletchley Park, north of London

and midway between Oxford and Cambridge. His mathematical work fed easily

into code and cipher breaking. It was a brilliant appointment. Turing

was more than any other single person responsible for the successful

assault on the German enigma. He made dazzling contributions to both

pure and applied mathematics, and pioneered what we today called artificial intelligence.

Turing wasn’t put administratively in charge of Bletchley. England might

have lost the war if he had been. He had no talent for administration, didn’t like

it. His gift was for seeing connections that lesser human beings couldn’t see

or even imagine for thinking of solutions like the computer to problems

that were beyond the can of everybody else. Plus, he was handy if a light light

socket didn’t work. Turing was the go to guy to get it fixed in a hurry.

He invented the computer because one of the things you do in cipher breaking is

a little bit like what I very frequently do when I go on my phone iPhone.

And you know, I’m looking up something and I forget the password.

Then you try another password, either works or doesn’t. And then if it’s a financial

institution, after three, three outs, you’re out. What the computer

does and helped encode in cipher breaking is you take a stretch of

letters, which you have every reason to believe you can

translate into English or whatever language you’re working with. And you have to try

all of the different combinations. That’s an awful lot of different combinations

of, I mean, millions and multi-millions. If you do it with a computer

and that’s what Turing’s realized he had to do. If humans do it, it takes forever. If a computer,

a computer can do it, it reduces the time to sometimes less than a day

or maybe two days. In any case, much faster.

Touring. Felt very much at home in the shadow world of Bletchley.

There was no time for academic snobbery and all the class nonsense of the outside

English world. These people had a war to win. The code breakers were an eccentric

lot. Winners of crossword puzzle contests, chess masters,

linguists, math wizards, whatever. As long as you got results with Turing’s funny

laugh and his unappealing fingernails and his unconventional

clothing, he fit right in. Churchill, who love the romance

of the spy world. Called The Codebreakers the geese who play.

Who laid the golden eggs but never cackled once on

a tour of Bletchley, seeing all of these odd looking creatures with their peculiar mannerisms.

Churchill whispered to the director, When I told you to leave no stone

unturned in finding people to work here. I didn’t expect you to take

me literally. David Conn, the dean

of historians of codes and Ciphers, once wrote at Bletchley. Success in Breaking

the Enigma shortened the war by up to two years, and that could be probably

six months to a year is more like it. Whatever. It was a towering accomplishment.

Because the work at Bletchley was classified and would remain so for almost half a century.

And some of it actually is still classified. Touring did not receive the public could

claim that he had earned when the war ended, but he was secretly

elected a fellow of the Royal Society. FRSS and an

officer of the most excellent order of the British Empire OBE.

Roger here outranks touring. He’s got a CBE behind his name

after the war. He created one of the first designs for a stored program computer,

the Ace A C in 48, 1948, touring

join the Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the

development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical

biology. His lifelong interest was in the Fibonacci sequence

of numbers 0 1 1 2 3 5

of the previous two. And he argued that branching and shrubs and plants.

I don’t see any around here to test it on followed the Fibonacci sequence.

It sounds weird, but there’s something to it. Just grab the next plant. You pass

by and look at it and look as if it’s not 0 1 1 2 3 5 8

and so on. I have made allusions to the British to the English class

structure now and again. Let me bring this into sharper focus in the 1950s.

England had a bad case of treason in high places. The Cambridge for

Guy Burgess, Donald maclane, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt were part

of a Soviet spy ring that passed every important secret they could get their hands

on through their operatives onto the Soviets. And these weren’t just secrets

about equipment and then formulas and A-bomb breakthroughs. They were also

names of British agents, some of whom they had

knew or and had recruited themselves. And they were these people were quickly

rounded up by the KGB and shot in the head after being tortured.

It’s an ugly picture. Kim Philby was the number one number two man in

emai 6, which is the British equivalent of the CIA. Anthony Blunt

had an office in Buckingham Palace. Esca studyin of the Queen’s paintings.

And he was a distinguished art historian. Burgess

and McClain were in the Foreign Office. Burgess

is the one who interests me here. He was homosexual and in the Cambridge of

the Thirties, he was the embodiment of a type perhaps of an era, a handsome,

blue eyed, curly haired, conversationally brilliant, politically

engaged. He was recruited by the Soviets while at Cambridge,

and he was the model for the mole. Bill Hayden in John Le Karis. Great spy

novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After the war, Burgess went to work

in the Foreign Office in a sensitive position with access to top secrets.

However, he became a heavy drinker, had always been one that got worse, and a slob

infamous on three continents continents for deficiencies in his personal habits.

And he was aggressively and publicly homosexual. He was relatively careful

in England about it, but he had to. It had to be. But he abroad, he could do whatever

he wanted to do. Pretty much his ambassador in Egypt one time had to reprimand

him for getting drunk and chasing a young man down a hotel corridor

shouting. This was about 11:00 at night, 11 at night. I must have

this delicious boy. The ambassador

said he was disturbing the other guests. Burgess was really

just too much, even by the loose standards of Cambridge, and the Soviets

eventually had to spirit him back to Moscow. But he was a member of the ruling

class, and with membership came privileges. Burgess once was arrested

in a men’s lavatory at Victoria Station in London, having passed a note inviting

the man in the next stall to have sex. The recipient of the note happened to be a vise

officer who promptly arrested Burgess and took him down to the constabulary

where Burgess called some of his influential friends, notably Lady Rothschild

of the Rothschild banking family, to intercede on his behalf, which they were

more than happy to do. Burgess’s disengenuous

explanation was that he had been sitting on the toilet reading a borrowed

copy of the novel Middlemarch. The man had imagination

given that when a note he had been using as a book bar fell out and

sail to the floor of the next exit. The next staff saw

it was a nice touch altogether, typical of the outrageous Burgess, and the police

hastened to swallow this preposterous story and be done with the whole

thing. He was sent home without a stain on his record, as the phrase goes.

But that kind of good natured treatment of homosexuals was a privilege reserved

for the ruling class, not for those caught in homosexual encounters who didn’t

know Lady Rothschild’s phone number. In other words, people like Alan Turing. Turing

was Burgess’s opposite in about every way. He was not well-born.

And although a fellow of King’s College, he was too ungainly and too much of an odd duck

to have made the right connections. Alan Turing, FRSS Oby

Quantum Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge was a loner, all the establishment

insignia notwithstanding. Turing didn’t belong. He didn’t have the right friends. He was

only an eccentric mathematical genius who had served his country with distinction

and quiet valor. No civilian apart, I suppose, from Winston Churchill,

did more to breed the germ beat the Germans than did Turing. He was a bona fide war hero

when Turing was arrested there in Manchester. Did no one feel an obligation

to intervene and get the charges dropped? Couldn’t someone have let Churchill

recently back as prime minister? No. Why bother to have

an old boy network if you’re not going to use it to save an Alan Turing?

There has been increasing recognition of what Turing accomplished since 1966.

The Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery

to a person for technical contributions to the computing community.

It’s considered to be the computing world’s highest honor. Almost equivalent, almost,

Steve, almost equivalent to the Nobel Prize. In

was named Alan Turing Way, a bridge on this road was widened

and carries today the name Alan Turing Bridge. A statue of Turing was unveiled

in Manchester in 2001. It is in Sackville Park

near the Canal Street Gay Village. The statue depicts the father of computer

science sitting on a bench in the park where he had often gone to be alone.

Turing is shown holding an apple, a symbol classically used to represent

forbidden love, the object that is said to have inspired Isaac Newton’s theory

of gravitation and the means of Turing’s own death.

The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text. Alan Matheson Turing

Science, as it would appear if in cipher ID by an enigma machine.

So what you have down there is a five letter group. I e k y

f space. Now the five letter group r o m s I know the file

about a group ADX you o other group K V K ze

c and then the last group is four letter group G you B.J.

I don’t want to be put there. Actually, I do want to be pathetic here. But a Nygma would

have in cipher the last group for letters Jehu B.J. as a five letter

group, but adding a dummy letter such as Q giving G Eubie

J. Q It’s always five letters. On September

Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government

for the way that they had treated touring after the war. America has

done its bit. The Princeton Alumni Weekly named touring the second most

significant alumnus in Princeton’s history, second only to President James

Madison. Touring had gone for two years to Princeton

to pick up a p_h_d_, which he didn’t have in England the time they had. Amazing

stuff. A one and a half ton life-size statue of touring

was unveiled in 2007 at Bletchley Park, having been

commissioned by the American billionaire Sidney Frank, who incidentally

made his money out of Gray Goose vodka

trivia. Keep that in mind. In nineteen

ninety nine, Time magazine named Turing one of the hundred most influential,

most important people of the 20th century for his role in the creation of the modern computer.

Queen Elizabeth issued a royal pardon to Turing in 2013.

We learned from Wikipedia that the logo of Apple Computer, which is I’m sure you know, is

Apple art. Actually, it could be a cherry. I’ve always thought that look, whatever

with a bite out of it. Some people thought that was a tribute to Alan Turing

with the Baute bite mark, a reference to the means of his suicide. Both the

designer of the logo and Apple deny that there’s any homage to Turing

in the design of the logo in the British television quiz show. Q I

presenter Stephen Fry recounted a conversation he had had with Steve Jobs,

the president or whatever, CEO of Apple saying the jobs response

was it isn’t true, but by God we wish it were touring may

not have had much luck with many of his friends, but he had extra ordinarily good luck in the man

who became his biographer, Andrew Hodges. Hodges biography

Alan Turing The Enigma came out in 1983. And then now

there’s a 2012 centenary edition. Andrew Hodges is both

a distinguished mathematical physicist and he’s gay. Hodges had access

to all of Turing’s papers, plus many people who had known Turing in life. His

biography is not only authoritative, it is a tour de force and beautifully written.

I have relied on it heavily in this essay. Turing reminds me of Ramanujan

and being profoundly different from most great mathematicians. Both were strange geniuses,

outsiders. But there the resemblance ends. Turing was a war hero. His

work at Bletchley saved countless lives and shortened the war. He can

claim joint fatherhood of the computer, along with the Hungarian John. For Norman,

the open embrace of his homosexuality by Turing took courage

in the 1950s. That can hardly be imagined today. And he died for it.

We still don’t understand the man and probably never will. His life was lived in water

in a different context has been called a wilderness of mirrors.

Ian Stewart, a conservative member of parliament who was behind

the campaign to secure a royal pardon, said Alan Turing was an

incredibly important figure in our history. He was the father

of computer science and the originator of the dominant technology of the late

and left a legacy for the world of today and tomorrow. This

royal pardon is a just reward for a man who was stripped of his honor,

his work and the loyalty he showed his nation. Thank you.