What Alan Turing means to us

Some of these comments are absolutely wild. It should go without saying that Alan Turing made an enormous impact on computing...but it looks like it needs to be said.

Nobody is trying to argue that Turing is the *only* important figure in computing. The fact that he is celebrated doesn't negate the impact of anybody else.

Edited to add: For anyone who's doubting Turing's impact on computing, or anyone who thinks that it's a modern phenomenon, Kleene's 1971 textbook [1] makes it pretty clear that he had an important impact.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/BubliothecaMathematicaStephenCol...

A lot of what Turing did was kept classified or not publicized too much by the British government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with his name.

Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.

Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.

The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.

If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.

I like how he tried to disprove the Riemann Hypothesis. That's actually how I first heard of Alan Turing, by seeing his paper on the subject. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/turing.zeta.pdf

To anyone who questions Turing singular contribution, not just to computer science, but to technological civilization in general I would point to one pithy fact: Alan Turing invented software. Computing machines existed before Turing, but they were all purpose-built for a single task. Turing was the first to describe a machine whose behavior could be changed to do anything you wished without modifying the hardware. The details of the architecture of the machines we use to perform computations today differ in detail from Turing's original design, but not in their essence, and not in their fundamental capabilities. The list of people who had as much practical positive impact on the world as Alan Turing can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

There is an article by Schmidhuber about early theoretical computer science to which Turing made contributions:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html

He claims Turing's achievements are often oversold. Whether or not that is true, the historical connections to Turing's theoretical work are interesting.

I remain in awe of him. Turing indisputably had an incredibly important role in computer science. His code-breaking work saved many lives in WWII, and he even contributed an important result to biology: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm3120 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge...

The way he was treated by his country after all he achieved and the lives he saved is a great outrage and a tragedy, and I always wonder what else he may have contributed to the world had he lived longer.

I really don't like the web page design - images that expressnothing, similarly flabby text.

My Dad actually met Turing, so i have always been excited (shake the hand that shook the hand) by him, and what he accomplished, but this page doesn't do anything for me, or i expect for anyone else.

Although I believe that Claude Shannon [1] was the father of computers and a much more important person than Alan Turing who probably had a more "controversial" personality and thus he became a "cinematic" figure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon