Speaker – Robert D. King Founding Dean, College of Liberal Arts<\/p>\n
Alan Turing was the greatest mathematician Britain produced in the twentieth century. After a brilliant start at Cambridge he became the leading light in the British code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, and he was instrumental in breaking the German ENIGMA cipher by inventing and constructing a prototype of the modern computer. This was key to the Allied victory in World War II. In 1952 he died tragically and alone, a suicide. This is his story. Robert D. King, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, spent his career at The University of Texas. He was at various times Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies, Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages, and Asian Studies, and member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He was Founding Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, a position he occupied from 1976-1993. He provided material support to Roger Louis in getting the British Studies Seminar off the ground in the 1970s and1980s; and he would like to pay tribute to Walter Wetzels for his commitment to British Studies over many decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Robert D. King Founding Dean, College of Liberal Arts Alan Turing was the greatest mathematician Britain produced in the twentieth century. After a brilliant start at Cambridge he became the leading light in the British code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, and he was instrumental in breaking the German ENIGMA cipher by inventing and […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/11\/18-09-28-BSLS.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"49.02M","filesize_raw":"51403328","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[60,53,47,40,46,61,58,59,62],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-68","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-alan-turing","6":"tag-british-studies","7":"tag-british-studies-lecture","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-dr-roger-louis","10":"tag-enigma","11":"tag-robert-d-king","12":"tag-robert-king","13":"tag-world-war-ii","14":"series-bsls","15":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":824,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_content":"\n Dean Robert King is the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. His interests are in historical linguistics, DNA and the origins of spoken language, language and politics, and language and people issues. <\/p>\n","post_title":"Robert King","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"robert-king","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=824","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Oh, there we go. David Fieldhouse,<\/p>\n as David Evans has racked Culley, David has arrived<\/p>\n so we can begin. We have several visitors,<\/p>\n including several from the mathematics department who are usually not with us on a<\/p>\n Friday afternoon. We’d like to welcome them and several others. It would<\/p>\n be unfair of me to specify individuals, but we’re very glad to have<\/p>\n such a good turnout. I will actually read my description of<\/p>\n Bob King because these lectures, as you know, are now broadcast and they’re<\/p>\n sometimes picked up by the BBC. So they’re heard throughout the world.<\/p>\n And for this reason, we need a slightly more formal introduction than it would be if<\/p>\n I were to ad lib about Bob King putting the government department into receivership<\/p>\n without in the English department into two and so on<\/p>\n during the question session. This would be welcome. They will not be welcome.<\/p>\n No way. Especially Miss Walter Wetzel’s<\/p>\n this afternoon. He would be here in his normal chair. He has attended the British studies<\/p>\n group for decades, and he had the same background as Bob King. In other words, he<\/p>\n was a mathematician before he went on to German literature. Unfortunately,<\/p>\n a few hours ago, Walter fell and broke his hip and is therefore not<\/p>\n able, obviously, to be with us. Bob King is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.<\/p>\n He’s spent his career at the University of Texas at various times. He was<\/p>\n the Rappaport chair of Jewish Studies, professor of linguistics, Germanic<\/p>\n languages and Asian Studies, and a member of the Academy of<\/p>\n Distinguished Teachers. He was the founding dean of the College of Liberal Arts,<\/p>\n a position he occupied from 1976 to 1993.<\/p>\n Virtually two decades. And I think this holds a record at the University of<\/p>\n Texas. He will talk to us this afternoon about Alan Turing<\/p>\n and the code breaking machine. And this is a lecture that everyone has been looking<\/p>\n forward to for a very long time. Bob?<\/p>\n Well, thank you very much. The<\/p>\n Roger had asked me to say something about Walter Wetzel’s, who, as Roger pointed<\/p>\n out, would normally be sitting right over there, but he can’t be here today. We just<\/p>\n learned walking in here this afternoon from Dagmar that he broke his hip.<\/p>\n Walter and I go back a very long way. I came to Texas in sixty five,<\/p>\n nineteen sixty five. He came came a year or two later<\/p>\n and we we were both in the German department. I was teaching medieval German<\/p>\n literature in those days and he was teaching classical German<\/p>\n literature, Gerta and Schiller and we became friends almost immediately. We did<\/p>\n a lot of things together in those intervening years. But here he has been<\/p>\n a mainstay not only in attendance, but in<\/p>\n the financially of British studies. He’s always been very, very generous.<\/p>\n And we, Roger wanted to recognize him. Those of you who<\/p>\n know British studies in its current format would not have recognized it in the<\/p>\n early days when Rodgers created it. It was relatively<\/p>\n small. You never knew how many people were going to be there. Sherry, you had to pay for yourself,<\/p>\n which was one of the first things I thought I could do something about as Dean.<\/p>\n So I started paying for the sherry. Roger kept on collecting, didn’t tell other people,<\/p>\n but it was a different thing. And I am very glad that I had something<\/p>\n to do with setting it up on a more permanent status. It wouldn’t be here, though, without our fearless<\/p>\n leader, Roger Lewis and his persistence<\/p>\n an uphill battle some of the time. But look what it’s become now.<\/p>\n I want to talk today about Alan Turing. If<\/p>\n I were addressing here an audience, let’s say, of computer scientists,<\/p>\n I wouldn’t need to say who Alan Turing was. That would be probably<\/p>\n the first name if they gave them one of these psychological tests, computer science.<\/p>\n What do you think of first Alan Turing’s name would be one of the first, if not the first,<\/p>\n that would come up, John, for Norman, who was a Hungarian mathematician. Brilliant.<\/p>\n Extraordinary. Who died actually quite young at Princeton<\/p>\n would be a second if I were talking to mathematicians. Alan Turing would need no introduction,<\/p>\n as they say. Let me just say a little bit about him here. For those of you who may not know<\/p>\n that much about him. He was British, of course. He was born<\/p>\n in 1912. He went to Cambridge. I’ll be talking about most of this here<\/p>\n in my paper. And early on, he was recognized<\/p>\n as brilliant. The he became a fellow of King’s<\/p>\n College, Cambridge, when he was in his early 20s.<\/p>\n And then the war came on and he was immediately<\/p>\n put to work by the British government in its cipher and code breaking operation<\/p>\n at Bletchley Park. The big riddle was the German Enigma machine,<\/p>\n which kind of looks like a typewriter, but it was really state of the art and considered<\/p>\n unbreakable. The Germans in particular thought it was unbreakable. It<\/p>\n wasn’t. But to the end, they believed that no one could break this because of the<\/p>\n complexity of the Turing of the Enigma machine. Alan<\/p>\n Turing was not the only person responsible for doing all that code breaking work,<\/p>\n but he was the name most people associate with it today.<\/p>\n And after the war, he established his reputation, though more<\/p>\n in low key way. He didn’t go back to Cambridge as a mathematician,<\/p>\n as a brilliant mathematician. Now, let me tell you his story, because part of it is,<\/p>\n is a really terrible story. And that’s part of what I wanted to talk about in my essay<\/p>\n in 1950s. Life was looking pretty good. Alan Turing. He was coming<\/p>\n to be recognized as the most brilliant mathematician. Britain<\/p>\n had produced in the mid 20th century, and his wartime work in Breaking the Enigma<\/p>\n was still classified, which delayed his recognition as a mathematician.<\/p>\n But he was known by those who mattered by Winston Churchill, for example, as the major<\/p>\n contributor to the hugely successful code breaking operation at<\/p>\n Bletchley Park. And as an extraordinary mind by John for Norman,<\/p>\n generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his of his time,<\/p>\n there was a movie that came out five years ago called The Infinity Game,<\/p>\n and it had Benedict Cumberbatch playing Turing. I liked<\/p>\n the movie. It’s the way all movies are. It plays fast and loose with<\/p>\n a lot of the facts that I’ll be talking about today.<\/p>\n But Cumberbatch is one of my favorite actors anyway. And I he really can’t do anything badly<\/p>\n where I’m concerned. And I thought he did a good job is presenting, touring<\/p>\n after treading water during the funding uncertainties of postwar England.<\/p>\n He decided not to return to his fellowship at King’s College, instead<\/p>\n taking what was presented as a cutting edge assignment involving computers and<\/p>\n mathematical biology at the University of Manchester. It wasn’t the perfect<\/p>\n job, but Turing was easy going and things like that give him some toys,<\/p>\n like a computer or a chess puzzle, and a few congenial people<\/p>\n to pal around with, talk to, let him practice is running and he was<\/p>\n generally content. Four years later, in 1954,<\/p>\n touring at night and alone dipped half an apple in cyanide,<\/p>\n eight most of it, and died. They found his body the next day.<\/p>\n He was just this side of 43 years old. In my<\/p>\n earlier life as a mathematician and computer programmer at Cape Canaveral, I had<\/p>\n known who Turing was, you couldn’t help knowing that in those early days<\/p>\n where you had languages like COBOL Down, it looks like you’re reading about ancient history<\/p>\n and you are to some extent COBOL Fortran based to arithmetic zeros<\/p>\n and ones machine language programing. I knew about that, but I knew<\/p>\n Turing was, but I didn’t know how he had died until much later. I still<\/p>\n flinch at the tragedy, the sadness of it all. This modern variant of Socrates<\/p>\n and the hemlock. What had happened was that Turing, a homosexual,<\/p>\n an unapologetic about it, had been charged with gross indecency<\/p>\n under Section Eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the<\/p>\n act that had put Oscar Wilde in prison, in Redding jail.<\/p>\n Turing was given probation with the proviso that he submit for treatment<\/p>\n by a qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal<\/p>\n Infirmary. In little words, Turing was sentenced to a form of<\/p>\n chemical castration, which was called organo therapy, thought<\/p>\n at the time to be a cure for homosexuality. Electric shock treatment<\/p>\n was also touted as a cure. The side effects were brutal and<\/p>\n humiliating. And Turing decided apparently that life was not worth<\/p>\n living. Many issues intersect in the Turing<\/p>\n case genius homosexuality. The British class system,<\/p>\n English public schools. Oxbridge snobbery and bureaucratic infighting.<\/p>\n And the personal Turing always had a dark side. From his earliest days onward,<\/p>\n that could never be completely concealed. England had vicious penalties against<\/p>\n homosexuality between males more explicitly than between females.<\/p>\n Queen Victoria spoke for her country of shopkeepers when she was told of lesbians<\/p>\n that they existed. And she asked. But what on earth do they do?<\/p>\n She didn’t have much imagination. Obviously, Queen Victoria,<\/p>\n most European countries had harsh laws, as did America and Canada. France was<\/p>\n the exception, which is why so many upper-class Englishmen took their holidays across<\/p>\n the English Channel. Two to 10 years in prison was the normal sentence<\/p>\n for a morals offense, though until 1861, the death penalty<\/p>\n was still on the books. Homosexuality obviously pinched<\/p>\n some existential nerve in the psyche of the English middle class, and the laws<\/p>\n were enforced right down through the 1950s. Nothing changed until the Wolfenden<\/p>\n report of 1957, which recommended that homosexual behavior between<\/p>\n consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offense.<\/p>\n The Wolfenden report eventually led to the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act of<\/p>\n But that wasn’t Alan Turing’s world. He was born in 1912<\/p>\n into what George Orwell described as his own social class,<\/p>\n the lower upper middle class turin’s father, who me<\/p>\n like got along with very well with his father, was largely absent, mostly in<\/p>\n India. He could have wished for a different mother, but she wasn’t completely bad as<\/p>\n mothers go. She worshiped him, even if there was a peculiar distance<\/p>\n between them. She described him in her memoirs after his death as a strange<\/p>\n study and light and shade. I hope my mother, she’s<\/p>\n restless, so would never have said that of me. Children from Turing’s class,<\/p>\n the lower upper middle class were expected to attend public that is, private<\/p>\n schools and on the whole expensive schools, which usually meant going for a scholarship<\/p>\n or well, got one to Eton. Touring had more trouble. Lattin was<\/p>\n his bugaboo, but eventually he got a scholarship to attend Sherbourne College,<\/p>\n a mid to upper ranked public school in Dorset. One of whose old<\/p>\n boys is the spy novelist John le Carre Ray. Turing had most<\/p>\n of the usual genius problems, plus some that were uniquely his own.<\/p>\n He wasn’t very good academically, but made up for it in what Sherbourne called the<\/p>\n sciences. He detested the collective sports, rugby<\/p>\n and all that and Cannings that made up so pard large apart of the<\/p>\n sadistic undertow of the English public school. He became a serious<\/p>\n runner and remained one up until the very end. Almost the end.<\/p>\n He almost qualified for the 1948 British Olympic marathon team.<\/p>\n He claimed that he became a fast runner so that he would never have to near be near<\/p>\n a ball that was thrown at him and thus have to do something with the thing.<\/p>\n And I totally sympathize. No matter what the sport, I was always picked last<\/p>\n and my brother was always picked first<\/p>\n by his last year’s in-shore born. However, Turing’s affection for the place had grown.<\/p>\n He had made friends, some of them for life, and he realized as soon as<\/p>\n he understood anything about himself at all, that he was attracted to boys,<\/p>\n not girls. He was homosexual and almost mathematical about it.<\/p>\n Some men are attracted to women, generalizes to some men, or attracted<\/p>\n to men. Q.E.D. elected a fellow of King’s College,<\/p>\n Cambridge at the young age of 22 in 1935. He had written a paper<\/p>\n on computable numbers with an application to the and Dong’s poll blame.<\/p>\n The decision problem that Girdle and other great mathematicians had worked on<\/p>\n that after a slow beginning made World-Class mathematicians like John Finn Norman sit up<\/p>\n and take notice. This paper establishes a fundamental principle of theoretical<\/p>\n computer science and more importantly, of software engineering. There is<\/p>\n no out algorithm that can prove that any other algorithm terminates.<\/p>\n It sounds straightforward sort of, but it took a genius to think of that.<\/p>\n Turing was not universally acknowledged yet as a mathematical genius of the first<\/p>\n order that would come later. But he knew at good he was, and he knew his time would come<\/p>\n to use a phrase of our day that he would have detested as I do. He was comfortable<\/p>\n in his own skin. That applies particularly to his homosexuality,<\/p>\n a preference that was easy to satisfy. King’s College. Many of the dons<\/p>\n were gay, as were many of the students, and an Oxford or Cambridge College<\/p>\n has always been a refuge, a shelter from the real world. He<\/p>\n was a product of that wondrous alchemy by which England used to take middle<\/p>\n class types with brains, give them a scholarship to a good public<\/p>\n school, to an Oxbridge college, and then turn out well. An Alan Turing<\/p>\n or George Orwell. A future prime minister or a servant of the empire.<\/p>\n Turing and outlasted the Canning’s and humiliations dealt out by an English public<\/p>\n school and came out of it with wounds but not display a bling<\/p>\n and with a few lifetime friends and not the slightest disposition to write an essay.<\/p>\n As Orwell did, entitled with heavy irony, such such were<\/p>\n the joys. Orwell and Turing remain two of my dwindling number<\/p>\n of culture heroes, or well, as an Etonian in his school uniform.<\/p>\n Well, the thing simply cannot be imagined, nor Turing in his.<\/p>\n After a few uncertain moves, Turing had been accepted into King’s College. King’s<\/p>\n College wasn’t his first choice. Trinity was. But Turing never really cared much<\/p>\n about things like that. He just plowed ahead wherever he was, and Kings turned out<\/p>\n to be the right choice for him because of its eminence in mathematics.<\/p>\n He wasn’t Club Bull, as the Brits put it. I can hardly imagine him standing<\/p>\n comfortably around in his gown before in the Commons, before high table<\/p>\n sipping sherry, as we do here today. Being clever and witty, smart.<\/p>\n Passing the port the right direction at dessert. But he would have put up with it<\/p>\n because he was basically a nice guy up to a point, and he knew that he was at the<\/p>\n right place. Finally, King’s College. For one thing, he could be a sex centric<\/p>\n and bizarre and his behavior as he wanted to be. Cambridge was a master work<\/p>\n of eccentricity, especially among its mathematicians.<\/p>\n Its leading light. G.H. Hardy was cricket crazy,<\/p>\n and he said never to have missed a Test match at Lord’s cricket grounds.<\/p>\n Hardy had been sent a famous letter by the self-taught but impoverished Indian<\/p>\n mathematician Ramanujan asking for support. The theorems<\/p>\n that Ramanujan offered were so compelling that Hardy concluded I had<\/p>\n never seen anything in the least like them before. A single look<\/p>\n at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician<\/p>\n of the highest class and in a characteristic hearty flourish, she added.<\/p>\n They must be true because if they were not true, no one would have the imagination<\/p>\n to invent them. There’s a great movie about<\/p>\n Hardy and Ramanujan. You may have seen it. The man who knew Infinity. Jeremy<\/p>\n Irons played Hardy and they<\/p>\n did a pretty good job there of presenting the thing.<\/p>\n We had a British study session once on Ramanujan. I remember that Jim Vic and Steve Weinberg<\/p>\n were up here with me. I guess that was it. Rwanda, John Centenary. That would have<\/p>\n been about right. And we talked about him and he was truly great mathematician in number<\/p>\n theory. He was eccentric and slightly bizarre, but he’s really<\/p>\n intelligent. One time, Hardy visited Ramanujan in the hospital<\/p>\n and commented to him that he had driven over in the taxi cab. No. 1729.<\/p>\n And being British and clever, Hardy added that the number seemed to him<\/p>\n a rather dull one. No amount of John replied.<\/p>\n It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum<\/p>\n of two cubes in two different VSS. One of the reasons<\/p>\n I fled my career as a mathematician for easier fields to plow<\/p>\n like linguistics is stories like that one. Great<\/p>\n mathematicians emit an otherworldly glow of intellect. It’s almost extraterrestrial.<\/p>\n The Hardy Ramanujan collaboration and No Theory is one of the most famous and original in mathematics.<\/p>\n It ended, sadly, in a way that reminds me a little bit of Turing the homosexuality played.<\/p>\n Nothing had nothing to do with it. Ramana John fell ill of a mysterious wasting<\/p>\n ailment, which probably was tuberculosis. That was the clinical diagnosis,<\/p>\n but it probably was something more akin to loneliness, isolation and starvation<\/p>\n as a Brahman of the highest order. He was poor, but he was a very high caste.<\/p>\n The things don’t line up that way. It’s not if you’re rich, you can you can<\/p>\n be a Brahmin or you can be anything, but if you’re a Brahmin, you’re not necessarily rich as<\/p>\n a Brahmin. He could eat only what he himself or another Brahmin<\/p>\n could cooked. And there were not enough Brahmans nor enough pukka Indian<\/p>\n food in Cambridge to keep him healthy. He returned to India and died<\/p>\n in 1920, aged 32. Turing was definitely odd.<\/p>\n He held up his trousers by string, wore his pajamas under his sports<\/p>\n coat, and he affected a teddy bear. Shades of Sebastian Flight<\/p>\n and Brideshead Revisited named Porgy during tutorials<\/p>\n touring often propped Porgy up by the fire and greeted his students with Porgy<\/p>\n is very studious this morning. Touring once showed up for a tennis match,<\/p>\n wearing nothing but a raincoat. Then there was the voice, high pitched<\/p>\n and likely to stall in mid-sentence with an thing<\/p>\n like that. And the word when it came could signal anything from a polysyllabic<\/p>\n monstrosity to a wild scheme or a rude suggestion.<\/p>\n Apart from the voice, what people remembered most about Turing’s were his hands<\/p>\n with odd ridges on his fingernails, never cleaned or cut.<\/p>\n Something of the or about him? No doubt.<\/p>\n Odd is all of this might have been outside college gates. It was hardly noticed inside Cambridge.<\/p>\n Some of the older dons may have looked down their noses at Turing and his personal habits,<\/p>\n but the undergraduates liked him. Above all, he was not a snob and that’s refreshing<\/p>\n for an Oxbridge college. And that was refreshingly novel. Also, he liked<\/p>\n to talk to them about mathematics and just about anything else. Books running.<\/p>\n Whatever. Though he never talked about his love life with the students.<\/p>\n War came in 1939, just as Turing’s research career was about to take<\/p>\n flight. When war was declared, Turing announced very simply that his patriotic<\/p>\n duty was to join the war effort. What do you want me to do? Britain<\/p>\n wasn’t going to make the same tragic mistake that it made in the First World War<\/p>\n when everybody was subject to conscription. Budding scientists, writers,<\/p>\n painters and poets alike were sent to France and Gallipoli to end up as<\/p>\n cannon fodder. A generation of talents died in stinking,<\/p>\n putrid trenches. Or like Rupert Brook, who wrote the famous war point,<\/p>\n The Soldier of Sunstroke, T.S. Eliot got it right. The 1920s<\/p>\n were a wasteland. Indeed. The military is known for making<\/p>\n ridiculous assignments of its personnel. They saw my two<\/p>\n math degrees and put me to work as a clerk typist<\/p>\n in a miracle of good sense. Turing was recruited to work on code breaking at the<\/p>\n British Center, recently established then in Bletchley Park, north of London<\/p>\n and midway between Oxford and Cambridge. His mathematical work fed easily<\/p>\n into code and cipher breaking. It was a brilliant appointment. Turing<\/p>\n was more than any other single person responsible for the successful<\/p>\n assault on the German enigma. He made dazzling contributions to both<\/p>\n pure and applied mathematics, and pioneered what we today called artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Turing wasn’t put administratively in charge of Bletchley. England might<\/p>\n have lost the war if he had been. He had no talent for administration, didn’t like<\/p>\n it. His gift was for seeing connections that lesser human beings couldn’t see<\/p>\n or even imagine for thinking of solutions like the computer to problems<\/p>\n that were beyond the can of everybody else. Plus, he was handy if a light light<\/p>\n socket didn’t work. Turing was the go to guy to get it fixed in a hurry.<\/p>\n He invented the computer because one of the things you do in cipher breaking is<\/p>\n a little bit like what I very frequently do when I go on my phone iPhone.<\/p>\n And you know, I’m looking up something and I forget the password.<\/p>\n Then you try another password, either works or doesn’t. And then if it’s a financial<\/p>\n institution, after three, three outs, you’re out. What the computer<\/p>\n does and helped encode in cipher breaking is you take a stretch of<\/p>\n letters, which you have every reason to believe you can<\/p>\n translate into English or whatever language you’re working with. And you have to try<\/p>\n all of the different combinations. That’s an awful lot of different combinations<\/p>\n of, I mean, millions and multi-millions. If you do it with a computer<\/p>\n and that’s what Turing’s realized he had to do. If humans do it, it takes forever. If a computer,<\/p>\n a computer can do it, it reduces the time to sometimes less than a day<\/p>\n or maybe two days. In any case, much faster.<\/p>\n Touring. Felt very much at home in the shadow world of Bletchley.<\/p>\n There was no time for academic snobbery and all the class nonsense of the outside<\/p>\n English world. These people had a war to win. The code breakers were an eccentric<\/p>\n lot. Winners of crossword puzzle contests, chess masters,<\/p>\n linguists, math wizards, whatever. As long as you got results with Turing’s funny<\/p>\n laugh and his unappealing fingernails and his unconventional<\/p>\n clothing, he fit right in. Churchill, who love the romance<\/p>\n of the spy world. Called The Codebreakers the geese who play.<\/p>\n Who laid the golden eggs but never cackled once on<\/p>\n a tour of Bletchley, seeing all of these odd looking creatures with their peculiar mannerisms.<\/p>\n Churchill whispered to the director, When I told you to leave no stone<\/p>\n unturned in finding people to work here. I didn’t expect you to take<\/p>\n me literally. David Conn, the dean<\/p>\n of historians of codes and Ciphers, once wrote at Bletchley. Success in Breaking<\/p>\n the Enigma shortened the war by up to two years, and that could be probably<\/p>\n six months to a year is more like it. Whatever. It was a towering accomplishment.<\/p>\n Because the work at Bletchley was classified and would remain so for almost half a century.<\/p>\n And some of it actually is still classified. Touring did not receive the public could<\/p>\n claim that he had earned when the war ended, but he was secretly<\/p>\n elected a fellow of the Royal Society. FRSS and an<\/p>\n officer of the most excellent order of the British Empire OBE.<\/p>\n Roger here outranks touring. He’s got a CBE behind his name<\/p>\n after the war. He created one of the first designs for a stored program computer,<\/p>\n the Ace A C in 48, 1948, touring<\/p>\n join the Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the<\/p>\n development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical<\/p>\n biology. His lifelong interest was in the Fibonacci sequence<\/p>\n of numbers 0 1 1 2 3 5<\/p>\n of the previous two. And he argued that branching and shrubs and plants.<\/p>\n I don’t see any around here to test it on followed the Fibonacci sequence.<\/p>\n It sounds weird, but there’s something to it. Just grab the next plant. You pass<\/p>\n by and look at it and look as if it’s not 0 1 1 2 3 5 8<\/p>\n and so on. I have made allusions to the British to the English class<\/p>\n structure now and again. Let me bring this into sharper focus in the 1950s.<\/p>\n England had a bad case of treason in high places. The Cambridge for<\/p>\n Guy Burgess, Donald maclane, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt were part<\/p>\n of a Soviet spy ring that passed every important secret they could get their hands<\/p>\n on through their operatives onto the Soviets. And these weren’t just secrets<\/p>\n about equipment and then formulas and A-bomb breakthroughs. They were also<\/p>\n names of British agents, some of whom they had<\/p>\n knew or and had recruited themselves. And they were these people were quickly<\/p>\n rounded up by the KGB and shot in the head after being tortured.<\/p>\n It’s an ugly picture. Kim Philby was the number one number two man in<\/p>\n emai 6, which is the British equivalent of the CIA. Anthony Blunt<\/p>\n had an office in Buckingham Palace. Esca studyin of the Queen’s paintings.<\/p>\n And he was a distinguished art historian. Burgess<\/p>\n and McClain were in the Foreign Office. Burgess<\/p>\n is the one who interests me here. He was homosexual and in the Cambridge of<\/p>\n the Thirties, he was the embodiment of a type perhaps of an era, a handsome,<\/p>\n blue eyed, curly haired, conversationally brilliant, politically<\/p>\n engaged. He was recruited by the Soviets while at Cambridge,<\/p>\n and he was the model for the mole. Bill Hayden in John Le Karis. Great spy<\/p>\n novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After the war, Burgess went to work<\/p>\n in the Foreign Office in a sensitive position with access to top secrets.<\/p>\n However, he became a heavy drinker, had always been one that got worse, and a slob<\/p>\n infamous on three continents continents for deficiencies in his personal habits.<\/p>\n And he was aggressively and publicly homosexual. He was relatively careful<\/p>\n in England about it, but he had to. It had to be. But he abroad, he could do whatever<\/p>\n he wanted to do. Pretty much his ambassador in Egypt one time had to reprimand<\/p>\n him for getting drunk and chasing a young man down a hotel corridor<\/p>\n shouting. This was about 11:00 at night, 11 at night. I must have<\/p>\n this delicious boy. The ambassador<\/p>\n said he was disturbing the other guests. Burgess was really<\/p>\n just too much, even by the loose standards of Cambridge, and the Soviets<\/p>\n eventually had to spirit him back to Moscow. But he was a member of the ruling<\/p>\n class, and with membership came privileges. Burgess once was arrested<\/p>\n in a men’s lavatory at Victoria Station in London, having passed a note inviting<\/p>\n the man in the next stall to have sex. The recipient of the note happened to be a vise<\/p>\n officer who promptly arrested Burgess and took him down to the constabulary<\/p>\n where Burgess called some of his influential friends, notably Lady Rothschild<\/p>\n of the Rothschild banking family, to intercede on his behalf, which they were<\/p>\n more than happy to do. Burgess’s disengenuous<\/p>\n explanation was that he had been sitting on the toilet reading a borrowed<\/p>\n copy of the novel Middlemarch. The man had imagination<\/p>\n given that when a note he had been using as a book bar fell out and<\/p>\n sail to the floor of the next exit. The next staff saw<\/p>\n it was a nice touch altogether, typical of the outrageous Burgess, and the police<\/p>\n hastened to swallow this preposterous story and be done with the whole<\/p>\n thing. He was sent home without a stain on his record, as the phrase goes.<\/p>\n But that kind of good natured treatment of homosexuals was a privilege reserved<\/p>\n for the ruling class, not for those caught in homosexual encounters who didn’t<\/p>\n know Lady Rothschild’s phone number. In other words, people like Alan Turing. Turing<\/p>\n was Burgess’s opposite in about every way. He was not well-born.<\/p>\n And although a fellow of King’s College, he was too ungainly and too much of an odd duck<\/p>\n to have made the right connections. Alan Turing, FRSS Oby<\/p>\n Quantum Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge was a loner, all the establishment<\/p>\n insignia notwithstanding. Turing didn’t belong. He didn’t have the right friends. He was<\/p>\n only an eccentric mathematical genius who had served his country with distinction<\/p>\n and quiet valor. No civilian apart, I suppose, from Winston Churchill,<\/p>\n did more to breed the germ beat the Germans than did Turing. He was a bona fide war hero<\/p>\n when Turing was arrested there in Manchester. Did no one feel an obligation<\/p>\n to intervene and get the charges dropped? Couldn’t someone have let Churchill<\/p>\n recently back as prime minister? No. Why bother to have<\/p>\n an old boy network if you’re not going to use it to save an Alan Turing?<\/p>\n There has been increasing recognition of what Turing accomplished since 1966.<\/p>\n The Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery<\/p>\n to a person for technical contributions to the computing community.<\/p>\n It’s considered to be the computing world’s highest honor. Almost equivalent, almost,<\/p>\n Steve, almost equivalent to the Nobel Prize. In<\/p>\n was named Alan Turing Way, a bridge on this road was widened<\/p>\n and carries today the name Alan Turing Bridge. A statue of Turing was unveiled<\/p>\n in Manchester in 2001. It is in Sackville Park<\/p>\n near the Canal Street Gay Village. The statue depicts the father of computer<\/p>\n science sitting on a bench in the park where he had often gone to be alone.<\/p>\n Turing is shown holding an apple, a symbol classically used to represent<\/p>\n forbidden love, the object that is said to have inspired Isaac Newton’s theory<\/p>\n of gravitation and the means of Turing’s own death.<\/p>\n The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text. Alan Matheson Turing<\/p>\n Science, as it would appear if in cipher ID by an enigma machine.<\/p>\n So what you have down there is a five letter group. I e k y<\/p>\n f space. Now the five letter group r o m s I know the file<\/p>\n about a group ADX you o other group K V K ze<\/p>\n c and then the last group is four letter group G you B.J.<\/p>\n I don’t want to be put there. Actually, I do want to be pathetic here. But a Nygma would<\/p>\n have in cipher the last group for letters Jehu B.J. as a five letter<\/p>\n group, but adding a dummy letter such as Q giving G Eubie<\/p>\n J. Q It’s always five letters. On September<\/p>\n Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government<\/p>\n for the way that they had treated touring after the war. America has<\/p>\n done its bit. The Princeton Alumni Weekly named touring the second most<\/p>\n significant alumnus in Princeton’s history, second only to President James<\/p>\n Madison. Touring had gone for two years to Princeton<\/p>\n to pick up a p_h_d_, which he didn’t have in England the time they had. Amazing<\/p>\n stuff. A one and a half ton life-size statue of touring<\/p>\n was unveiled in 2007 at Bletchley Park, having been<\/p>\n commissioned by the American billionaire Sidney Frank, who incidentally<\/p>\n made his money out of Gray Goose vodka<\/p>\n trivia. Keep that in mind. In nineteen<\/p>\n ninety nine, Time magazine named Turing one of the hundred most influential,<\/p>\n most important people of the 20th century for his role in the creation of the modern computer.<\/p>\n Queen Elizabeth issued a royal pardon to Turing in 2013.<\/p>\n We learned from Wikipedia that the logo of Apple Computer, which is I’m sure you know, is<\/p>\n Apple art. Actually, it could be a cherry. I’ve always thought that look, whatever<\/p>\n with a bite out of it. Some people thought that was a tribute to Alan Turing<\/p>\n with the Baute bite mark, a reference to the means of his suicide. Both the<\/p>\n designer of the logo and Apple deny that there’s any homage to Turing<\/p>\n in the design of the logo in the British television quiz show. Q I<\/p>\n presenter Stephen Fry recounted a conversation he had had with Steve Jobs,<\/p>\n the president or whatever, CEO of Apple saying the jobs response<\/p>\n was it isn’t true, but by God we wish it were touring may<\/p>\n not have had much luck with many of his friends, but he had extra ordinarily good luck in the man<\/p>\n who became his biographer, Andrew Hodges. Hodges biography<\/p>\n Alan Turing The Enigma came out in 1983. And then now<\/p>\n there’s a 2012 centenary edition. Andrew Hodges is both<\/p>\n a distinguished mathematical physicist and he’s gay. Hodges had access<\/p>\n to all of Turing’s papers, plus many people who had known Turing in life. His<\/p>\n biography is not only authoritative, it is a tour de force and beautifully written.<\/p>\n I have relied on it heavily in this essay. Turing reminds me of Ramanujan<\/p>\n and being profoundly different from most great mathematicians. Both were strange geniuses,<\/p>\n outsiders. But there the resemblance ends. Turing was a war hero. His<\/p>\n work at Bletchley saved countless lives and shortened the war. He can<\/p>\n claim joint fatherhood of the computer, along with the Hungarian John. For Norman,<\/p>\n the open embrace of his homosexuality by Turing took courage<\/p>\n in the 1950s. That can hardly be imagined today. And he died for it.<\/p>\n We still don’t understand the man and probably never will. His life was lived in water<\/p>\n in a different context has been called a wilderness of mirrors.<\/p>\n Ian Stewart, a conservative member of parliament who was behind<\/p>\n the campaign to secure a royal pardon, said Alan Turing was an<\/p>\n incredibly important figure in our history. He was the father<\/p>\n of computer science and the originator of the dominant technology of the late<\/p>\n and left a legacy for the world of today and tomorrow. This<\/p>\n royal pardon is a just reward for a man who was stripped of his honor,<\/p>\n his work and the loyalty he showed his nation. Thank you.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/68\/alan-turing-genius-patriot-victim.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/68\/alan-turing-genius-patriot-victim.mp3","audio_player":"