It was a long time coming to this. U.K. finally pardons computer pioneer Alan Turing.
He was part of the team that broke the Nazi code machine (Enigma), but that wasn’t good enough for the 1950’s hatred of all things gay. (Actually the 1950s hated everything that wasn’t white, Christian, and male.)
Turing’s contributions to science spanned several disciplines, but he’s perhaps best remembered as the architect of the effort to crack the Enigma code, the cypher used by Nazi Germany to secure its military communications. Turing’s groundbreaking work — combined with the effort of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park near Oxford and the capture of several Nazi code books — gave the Allies the edge across half the globe, helping them defeat the Italians in the Mediterranean, beat back the Germans in Africa and escape enemy submarines in the Atlantic.
If you were to study computer science (at any school that would teach you more than how to program in Java, and then give you a degree) you would study the Turing Machine. The Turing Test is the benchmark we will use to determine if machines ever develop real intelligence. And part of the reason we aren’t speaking German, can be laid at the feet of Alan Turing. But none of that stopped the hatred the 1950s directed at everything different.
Alan Turing was gay, and 1950s Britain punished the mathematician’s sexuality with a criminal conviction, intrusive surveillance and hormone treatment meant to extinguish his sex drive.
He eventually committed suicide.
357 Magnum Archive 