Alan Mathison Turing at the time of his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society. Photograph was taken at the Elliott & Fry studio on 29 March 1951.
Alan Turing’s bombe, at its peak, decoded 4000 German military messages a day and arguably did more to end WWII than the invention of the nuclear bomb.
The result of Turing’s innovations and ideas contributed enormously to a huge economic wave lasting for more than 5 decades. His concept of a Turing machine not only formalized our concepts of “algorithm” and “computation”, over the years it also revealed the very nature of information itself.
Alan would have been 100 today. He and I share a birthday. He was 42 when he died.
Every time I hear about a child being bullied to death in the news, I think of him and what he achieved in his foreshortened life. What contributions could each of those children have made to this world had they been accepted for who they were?
Thank you Mr. Turing, the world is a better place because of your vast contributions, if only we could learn the lessons of your life as well as your mind, it would be better still.
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