>It is funny how the article doesnt mention him committing suicide as a result of being chemically castrated by the UK authorities for being gay.
Yeah I agree, I assume this is actually the main reason he is so well known and celebrated today. Mere obsession with computers would make Godel, Alonso Church, and others with equivalent models of computation just as famous.
> Yeah I agree, I assume this is actually the main reason he is so well known and celebrated today. Mere obsession with computers would make Godel, Alonso Church, and others with equivalent models of computation just as famous.
I absolutely disagree.
For one thing, Turing didn't just invent a model of computation - he invented what is seen, in some sense, to be the precursor to the actual, physical computer (the Turing Machine).
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.
I am a huge fan of Godel's work, don't get me wrong, but Alan Turing was far more important in world history, and indeed in math/science history (though Godel is of course hugely important too).
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.
You are, of course, completely correct. I was simplifying for the sake of the post.
> I don't think his tragic death has made him more famous; if anything, it delayed his fame -
I agree! I was very tempted to answer the parent by saying that Turing isn't very famous. I don't think most people have heard of him, or at least, hadn't 10 years ago. The movie coming out helped, I imagine.
The Nobel Prize equivalent of Computer Science is called "The Turing Award" and has been coming out since the 1960's (and no Turing didn't find them in the same way Alfred Nobel funded the Nobel Prize)
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.
I don't know. I first heard of the 'Turing Test' at school, long before I knew about his conviction. And his work during WWII gives him a bit of a hero status, even for people who aren't interested in computers.
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.
I'm not sure for overseas, but in the UK he is by far well known for his contribution towards cracking German transmissions and helping towards ending the war.
The Turing Machine is something else he is known for (as an aside for his contributions during WW2) but I suspect if you were to ask the average person, they'd suggestion foremostly he cracked German transmissions not built the precursor to the computer.
Perhaps more recently he will have been known to be gay and had committed suicide, because in recent years there has been a lot more about him in the media.
I've got to confess I didn't know much about his later life and suicide for a long time and only really knew of him in regards to WW2 and his part played in computing history.
Yeah I agree, I assume this is actually the main reason he is so well known and celebrated today. Mere obsession with computers would make Godel, Alonso Church, and others with equivalent models of computation just as famous.