As for current atrocities, look no further than the American border, the Chinese surveillance state (and the western hemisphere's complicity & avoiding the issue) or corporate monstrosities like FB enabling the persecution of minorities like the Rohingya.

Not beating a dead horse about something isn’t the same as sweeping it under a rug.

I’d rather not have every single bit of communication contain a reminder of some past horror.

Does his end makes him more of an icon for disenfranchised minorities than the immense contributions this genius made over his life. If history were different and he were hit by a bus or lived a long life, he would still be an icon, no?

How so? As a gay man, I’m not encouraged by the story of his abuse. If anything it serves as an oppressive reminder that some people will always irrationally wish me harm.

Perhaps some people feel “empowered” by a victim mentality, but that doesn’t seem very socially progressive to me.

While Turing did practical crypto work during WW2, I think Tutte's work on the Lorenz cipher was more impressive:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte#Second_World_War

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci...

Everyone talks about Enigma during WW2, but the Poles had mostly figured things out pre-War (for which they're generally forgotten), and it was largely a matter of brute forcing things during the War IMHO.

> But more importantly, in addition to doing that, he actually built one of the first actual computers. And he did that in order to break the German encryption in WW2.

Not quite. He built the Bombe, which was not a computer. Elsewhere at Bletchley Park, other people built Colossus, one of the earliest electronic computing machines - but still not a computer, really, as it had no program.

After the war, the first computer was built in Manchester, and although Turing was around, and it was clearly based in part on his ideas, my understanding is that he wasn't directly involved with building it.

I think it's Turing's dual role in laying the theoretical foundation of computing and winning World War 2 that made him famous.

I don't think his tragic death has made him more famous; if anything, it delayed his fame - imagine how well-known he would have been if he'd lived on into the computer age! Not a BBC documentary would go by without photos of Turing looking seriously at an ICL 2900, Turing sat at a BBC Model B, an elderly Turing and a thirtysomething Tim Berners-Lee mugging at the camera, etc.

While he was in the military, the work of his unit was so secret that other units called them "the do nothings."

So while it may not be true that the lurid nature of his demise is the reason in a "people like to rubberneck" kind of way, his death at an early age is likely part of why the world knows of his work. Many crypto experts worked secretly for the government and lived and died in obscurity.

Being famous for your work (while still working) and doing secret work tend to be mutually exclusive.

This is a common pattern, journalists propagate the scientific tales of scientists they like for non-scientific reasons. I wonder why the name "Einstein" is synonymous with "genius" in the media while Maxwell, von Neumann, Godel, Newton and many others could equally fit. I suspect Einstein has been so favored by the media to the exclusion of others because Einstein was a major proponent of Zionism. Similarly people call modern computers "Turing Machines" even though they are more accurately "von Neumann machines" because journalists love that after they've revered Turing as the mega-genius-man of computers, they can turn around and treat computers as a cause celebre of gay pride.