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Alan Turing—Queer Codebreaker and Father of Modern Computing


Godrey Argent Studio, via The Royal Society


If you’re reading this, it’s likely you are doing so on a computer of some sort. From phones to laptops to tablets, our world is made possible by the number-crunching hardware behind your screen. The advent of modern computing has opened the doors to a new age of humanity; however, as a result of wartime classification and homophobia, you may know very little about the mind responsible for making modern computers.


Alan Turing was born on June 28. 1912 in London, where he would attend the University of Cambridge before obtaining a fellowship position at King’s college in 1934. There, he would publish his seminal paper in 1936, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”


The Entscheidungsproblem, or Decision Problem, was a proposition that one could find an algorithm to determine whether a mathematical statement could be proven, being given a statement and returning a “Yes” or a “No.” Turing and another scientist named Alonzo Church independently proved that the Entscheidungsproblem could not be answered, affirming that not every problem in mathematics can be solved by a computer.


Crucially, Turing’s 1936 paper also proved that any operation performed by computers, which were at the time human (often female) number-crunchers, could also be performed by his universal Turing Machine. According to Turing, these human computers were "supposed to be following fixed rules; [they had] no authority to deviate from them in any detail." If this was true, then Turing’s own nonhuman “computer” could perform just like a human one, without tiring or making mistakes—an idea which laid the groundwork for modern computing.


Following his stay at King’s college, Turing would obtain his PhD at Princeton University in 1938, returning to England in time to see war erupt across Europe. At the time, Germany used a complex machine known as Enigma to encode wartime messages. With information from Bomba, a Polish-made codebreaker, Alan Turing and a team of researchers working in Bletchley Park invented the Bombe. This machine continued to decipher German messages even after a change in operating procedures rendered the Polish Bomba useless. The Bombe went on to decode countless German messages and were essential to British reconnaissance, not only representing an astounding advancement in computing technology but becoming essential to the Allied victory.


Though their efforts at Bletchley Park would remain classified for the rest of Turing and his coworker’s lives, Turing’s career would continue going uphill, becoming an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and a member of the Royal Society of London, and contributing much to the growing field of modern computing. However, his life would soon take a sharp and unjust turn.


In 1952, Alan Turing was convicted for “gross indecency” because he was homosexual. His career opportunities were dashed by this criminal record, and he was subjected to hormone therapy equivalent to chemical castration. Two years later, Turing died a criminal, a victim of Britain’s homophobic laws despite his contributions to his country and the scientific community. He was killed due to cyanide poisoning and the official cause of death was suicide, though some doubt this verdict.


England was slow to recognize Turing’s work and apologize for their mistreatment of the queer mathematician; however, his case gained infamy in the early 21st century and in 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologized for Britain’s “utterly unfair” treatment of the man. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Alan Turing a royal pardon.


Today, we use programming and microchips to mold the number-crunching capabilities of the computer to create all sorts of amazing innovations, but at the heart of it all is Alan Turing—a queer man with a revolutionary mind, who had a complicated story and lived in an equally complicated time. It is crucial that we amplify the voices and tell the stories of such figures, who have been silenced and unjustly incriminated for far too long.


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