If you asked a random sample of people today who "Alan Turing" was I'm not confident that you would receive a majority of positive responses. If you work in the computer industry as I do then you have less excuses for not knowing, Turing has been referred to by many as the "father of modern computing", in fact the computer industry equivalent of the Nobel Prize is called the "Turing Award". Alan Turing was a genius, way ahead of his time and you could argue saved our bacon in WWII; he was a pivotal member of the code-breaking team that cracked the German enigma code, probably the single most important factor in securing the eventual victory of the allies over the Nazis. Now you would think that after such a brilliant feat of mathematical genius that helped to save our entire nation, he would be well known, like Barnes Wallis or Winston Churchill. Unfortunately such accolade was not infused into our collective consciousness, you see, Turing was a homosexual. After the war he went to Manchester to work on the Mark 1 computer being developed there but lost his job when he was convicted of being gay in the early 50s, he avoided public humiliation by agreeing to undergo chemical "castration", but troubled, he went on to commit suicide shortly afterwards aged 41.
A British computer expert has launched a campaign to posthumously apologise to Turing, I'm not entirely convinced that would achieve much, perhaps putting his face on five pound notes or naming a wing of the science museum after him would be more lasting, it's a nice idea anyway.
2 comments:
Of course I know who Turing is, but I didn't realise he was gay.
Can you imagine being convicted of being gay? He *is* owed an apology, and not because of the contributions he made, but just because it is a horrendous thing to do to a person, to convict them for some characteristic as central to their identity as their sexuality that harmed no one.
I sometimes see homophobes point out that gay people are less happy in the world (there was an article today, fe, about homosexuals seeking therapy more than heterosexuals), as though there is something intrinsically less satisfying in life when one is gay, rather than considering that the climate for gay people might be fostering the unhappiness.
Lisa, quite, gays are less happy, blacks are less intelligent, Christians are more moral; some members of our species seem to have a lot more evolving to do. All these pathetic "out-group" persecution complexes are sickening to witness.
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