Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, when his father, Julius Mathison Turing, was taking a break from his job in India. His father worked for the British government that ruled India at that time. His father’s father was a Scottish preacher who came from a rich
Family that did business in the Netherlands. His mother, Ethel Sara Turing, was the daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, who was in charge of building railways in India. Her family was from Ireland and belonged to a wealthy class of Protestants. Ethel grew up mostly
In County Clare in Ireland. Julius and Ethel got married on 1 October 1907 at a church in Dublin. Julius’s job took the family to India, where his father had been a high-ranking soldier. But Julius and Ethel wanted their children to grow up in Britain, so they moved back
To Maida Vale, London, where Alan Turing was born on 23 June 1912. There is a blue sign on the house where he was born, which later became a hotel. Turing had an older brother, John Ferrier Turing, whose son became a nobleman.
Turing’s father still had his job in India when Turing was a child, and his parents traveled back and forth between Britain and India. They left their two sons with an old couple who used to be in the Army. In Britain, Turing stayed at a place called Baston Lodge, near
The sea, which also has a blue sign now. The sign was put up on 23 June 2012, a hundred years after Turing was born. Turing was very smart from a young age, and he showed his amazing abilities later in life.
His parents bought a house in Guildford in 1927, and Turing stayed there during school breaks. The house also has a blue sign on it. Turing’s parents sent him to St Michael’s, a school for young kids at 20 Charles Road,
St Leonards-on-Sea, when he was six years old. He stayed there until he was nine. The headmistress saw how smart he was and said “…I have seen boys who are clever and boys who work hard, but Alan is a genius”. From January 1922 to 1926, Turing studied at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, a school
In the village of Frant in Sussex. When he was 13 years old, he moved to Sherborne School, a school where students live and study in the town of Sherborne in Dorset. He lived at Westcott House. The first day of school was on the same day as a big strike in Britain,
But Turing really wanted to go to school. So he rode his bike by himself for 60 miles from Southampton to Sherborne. He stayed at an inn for one night on the way. Some of the teachers at Sherborne did not appreciate Turing’s interest in mathematics
And science. They thought education should focus more on the classics, like ancient languages and literature. His headmaster wrote to his parents: “I hope he will not get confused. If he wants to stay at this school, he should try to learn more things. If he only wants
To be a science expert, he is wasting his time at this school”. But Turing did not let this stop him. He kept showing amazing skills in the subjects he liked, solving hard problems in 1927 without learning the basics of calculus. When he was 16 years old, he
Learned about Albert Einstein’s work. He understood it very well, and he might have even figured out that Einstein was challenging Newton’s ideas about how things move from a book that did not say this clearly. When Turing was studying at Sherborne, he became very close friends with another student
Named Christopher Collan Morcom, who was born on 13 July 1911 and died on 13 February 1930. Some people say that Morcom was Turing’s first love. They both liked science and mathematics, and Morcom also taught Turing about astronomy. But their friendship ended too soon, because
Morcom died from a disease that he got from drinking bad milk a long time ago. Turing was very sad about losing Morcom. He tried to deal with his sadness by working even harder on the things that he and Morcom enjoyed together. He wrote a letter to Morcom’s mother, Frances Isobel Morcom, and said:
“I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little
The same about me … I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do.” Turing and Morcom’s mother stayed in touch for many years after Morcom died. She would
Send Turing presents, and he would write to her, usually on Morcom’s birthday. The day before Morcom had been dead for three years (13 February 1933), Turing wrote this letter to Mrs. Morcom: “I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this
Letter is just to tell you that I shall be thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here. Your affectionate Alan.” Some people thought that Turing stopped believing in God and only cared about physical things
Because of Morcom’s death. It seems that he used to think that there was something like a soul, that was not part of the body and that lived on after death. In another letter, that he also sent to Morcom’s mother, Turing said:
“Personally, I believe that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not by the same kind of body … as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body can hold on to a ‘spirit’, whilst the body is alive and awake
The two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies, the ‘mechanism’ of the body, holding the spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately.” Turing finished high school at Sherborne and then went to King’s College, Cambridge,
Where he studied mathematics for three years from February 1931 to November 1934. He did very well and got the highest grade. His final project, On the Gaussian error function, was about a mathematical rule called the central limit theorem. He wrote it in his last year
And submitted it in November 1934. It was approved in March 1935. In the same year, he started his master’s degree, which he finished in 1937. He also published his first paper, a short article called Equivalence of left and right almost periodicity, in a
Math journal. Later that year, he became a Fellow of King’s College because of his excellent project. But he did not know that someone else, Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg, had already proven the same rule in 1922. Still, the committee liked Turing’s work and thought
It was original and valuable. Abram Besicovitch, one of the committee members, even said that if Turing’s work had come out before Lindeberg’s, it would have been “an important event in the mathematical literature of that year”. In 1935 and 1936, Turing studied how to solve problems using logic and math, based on some
Ideas by Gödel. In April 1936, he sent his first draft to his friend Newman. That same month, another researcher named Church published a paper with similar ideas to Turing’s. In May, Turing finished his paper and sent it to a journal. It was called “On Computable
Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”. It came out in two parts, in November and December. In this paper, Turing used a simple model of a machine that could follow instructions to do calculations. He called it a Turing machine. He showed that this machine could
Do any calculation that could be written as an algorithm. He also showed that there was a problem that could not be solved by any machine or algorithm. This problem was about whether a Turing machine would ever stop or run forever. This paper is considered one of the most important papers in math.
Turing and Church both found different ways to prove the same thing using math, but Turing’s way was easier to understand and follow. He also came up with the idea of a ‘Universal Machine’ (now called a universal Turing machine), which was a machine that could do
Any kind of calculation that another machine could do (just like Church’s math method). They both agreed that their methods could calculate anything that was possible to calculate. John von Neumann said that Turing’s idea was the basis of the modern computer. Even today, Turing machines are very important for studying how computers work.
Turing studied with Church at Princeton University for two years, and he was a special kind of fellow there. He did a lot of math work, but he also learned about secret codes and built part of a machine that could multiply numbers very fast. He got his PhD in math from Princeton,
And his thesis was about a new kind of logic and computing, where Turing machines could use extra help from something called oracles, to deal with problems that Turing machines alone could not solve. John von Neumann wanted to work with him, but Turing decided to go back to the United Kingdom.
During the Second World War, Turing was one of the main people who helped crack the secret codes of the Germans at Bletchley Park. A historian and codebreaker who worked with him, Asa Briggs, said, “You needed exceptional talent, you needed genius at Bletchley and Turing’s was that genius.”
Starting from September 1938, Turing worked part-time with a British organization that broke codes. He focused on solving the Enigma machine, a device that the Nazis used to make their messages unreadable, along with Dilly Knox, another senior codebreaker. After a
Meeting in July 1939 where the Polish gave the British and French some information about how the Enigma machine worked and how to decode its messages, Turing and Knox came up with a better solution. The Polish method depended on a weak part of the Enigma machine that
The Germans could easily change, and they did so in May 1940. Turing’s method was more general, using clues from the messages to create a machine that could find the right settings of the Enigma machine (an improvement on the Polish machine).
Turing worked here in 1939 and 1940, before moving to another place. On 4 September 1939, the day after the UK went to war with Germany, Turing arrived at Bletchley Park, where the codebreakers worked. Like everyone else who came to Bletchley, he had to sign a document
That said he would not tell anyone about his work at Bletchley, or he would face serious legal consequences. Designing the bombe was one of the five big breakthroughs that Turing made in cracking secret codes during the war. The other four were: figuring out how the German navy changed
Their codes; creating a faster way to use the bombes with math; finding a way to adjust the wheels of a machine that the Germans used to send messages (called Tunny); and making a device that could scramble voices over the phone and keep them safe from spies (called Delilah).
Turing used math to make the code breaking process more efficient and smart. He wrote two papers about his methods, called The Applications of Probability to Cryptography and Paper on Statistics of Repetitions. These papers were so useful to the code breakers and their successors
That they were kept secret by the government until April 2012, just before Turing’s 100th birthday. A math expert who worked for the code breakers, and only gave his name as Richard, said that the papers were kept secret for so long because they were very important and
Relevant to the code breaking work after the war. “[He] said the fact that the contents had been restricted “shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject”. … The papers detailed using “mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely settings so that they can be tried
As quickly as possible”. … Richard said that GCHQ had now “squeezed the juice” out of the two papers and was “happy for them to be released into the public domain”.” Turing was a very unusual person at Bletchley Park. His co-workers called him “Prof”
And his book about Enigma was also called the “Prof’s Book”. Jack Good, who was another code-breaker and worked with Turing, said this about him: “In the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he
Would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off. His bicycle had a fault: the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in
Time to adjust the chain by hand. Another of his eccentricities is that he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent it being stolen.” Peter Hilton shared his memories of working with Turing in Hut 8, a secret code-breaking
Unit, in his article “Reminiscences of Bletchley Park” from A Century of Mathematics in America: “It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by
Talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual
Life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing
And unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.” Hilton said similar things in the Nova PBS documentary Decoding Nazi Secrets.
Turing was a very good runner and sometimes ran the 40 miles (64 km) from Bletchley to London when he had to attend meetings. He could run as fast as the best marathon runners in the world. He wanted to join the 1948 British Olympic team, but he got injured. His tryout
Time for the marathon was only 11 minutes more than Thomas Richards, who won the silver medal for Britain in the Olympics. He was the fastest runner in the Walton Athletic Club, and they found out when he ran past them by himself. When asked why he trained so hard, he said:
“I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; it’s the only way I can get some release.” It is difficult to say exactly how much Ultra intelligence, the secret information from
Breaking enemy codes, helped to end the war. But Harry Hinsley, the official war historian, said that this work made the war in Europe more than two years shorter and saved over 14 million lives. When the war was over, everyone who had worked at Bletchley Park got a message that told
Them to keep quiet about what they had done there. The Official Secrets Act said that they could not talk about it, not even after the war. So, even though Turing got an award from King George VI in 1946 for his wartime work, his work was still a secret for many years.
Turing arrived at Bletchley Park and quickly designed a machine called the bombe. It was better at cracking Enigma codes than a similar machine from Poland. The bombe had a clever improvement from another mathematician, Gordon Welchman. It was one of the main and fastest tools to decode Enigma messages.
The bombe looked for the right settings to unlock an Enigma message. It used a crib: a part of the message that was already known. The bombe tried different settings of the rotors, which had many possible combinations. For each setting, the bombe used the crib
To make logical guesses. The guesses were done by electric circuits. The bombe knew when a setting was wrong and moved on to the next one. Most of the settings were wrong and ruled out. Only a few were left to check more carefully. A setting was
Wrong when a coded letter became the same letter in plain text. That could not happen with Enigma. The first bombe was ready on 18 March 1940. Turing and his team of code-breakers were working hard to crack the secret messages
Of the Germans, who used a machine called Enigma. They had learned some tricks from the Polish code-breakers, and they had built their own machines, called bombes, to help them. But they did not have enough people or bombes to read all the messages. In the
Summer, they did very well, and the Germans lost many ships. But they needed more help to keep up with the changes that the Germans made to their codes. They asked for more help from the people in charge, but they did not get it.
On 28 October, they decided to write a letter to Winston Churchill, the leader of Britain, and tell him about their problems. Turing’s name was first on the letter. They said that they only needed a little help compared to the huge amount of money and soldiers that
The war was costing. And they said that they could help the soldiers a lot if they got what they needed. Churchill’s biographer said that this letter made a big difference. Churchill wrote a note to his general, which said: “DO THIS TODAY. Give them everything
They want as soon as possible and tell me when it is done.” On 18 November, the head of the spy agency said that they were doing everything they could. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park did not know what Churchill had done, but they noticed that things got
Easier for them. By the end of the war, they had more than two hundred bombes working for them. Turing chose to work on the very hard problem of cracking the German navy’s secret code “because no one else was trying to solve it and I could have it all to myself”. He
Figured out the key part of the code system that the navy used, which was harder than the ones used by the other branches of the German military. On the same night, he also came up with the idea of Banburismus, a method of using math
And statistics to help break the navy’s code, “though I was not sure that it would actually work, and I did not find out until some days later when we succeeded”. He created a way of measuring how likely a piece of evidence was, and he called it the ban. Banburismus
Could eliminate some of the possible ways that the code machine could be set up, which made it faster to test the remaining options on the bombes. These were special machines that could try many different code settings at once. Later, this method of using bans
To measure evidence was also used to crack another German code called the Lorenz cipher. Turing went to the United States in November 1942 and worked with US Navy codebreakers on the navy’s code and bombe machines in Washington. He also visited their Computer Lab in Dayton, Ohio.
Turing was not impressed by the American bombe design: “The American Bombe programme was to produce 336 Bombes, one for each wheel order. I used to smile inwardly at the conception of the Bombe hut routine implied by this programme,
But thought that no particular purpose would be served by pointing out that we would not really use them in that way. Their test (of commutators) can hardly be considered conclusive as they were not testing for the bounce with electronic stop finding devices. Nobody seems
To be told about rods or offiziers or banburismus unless they are really going to do something about it.” On this journey, he also helped Bell Labs make devices that could protect people’s conversations from being spied on. He came back to Bletchley Park in March 1943. While
He was away, Hugh Alexander became the leader of Hut 8, even though he had been acting like one for a while (Turing did not care much about managing the team). Turing became an expert adviser for breaking secret codes at Bletchley Park. Alexander said this about Turing’s work:
“There should be no question in anyone’s mind that Turing’s work was the biggest factor in Hut 8’s success. In the early days, he was the only cryptographer who thought the problem worth tackling and not only was he primarily responsible for the main theoretical
Work within the Hut, but he also shared with Welchman and Keen the chief credit for the invention of the bombe. It is always difficult to say that anyone is ‘absolutely indispensable’, but if anyone was indispensable to Hut 8, it was Turing. The pioneer’s work always tends
To be forgotten when experience and routine later make everything seem easy and many of us in Hut 8 felt that the magnitude of Turing’s contribution was never fully realized by the outside world.” In July 1942, Turing came up with a technique called Turingery (or jokingly Turingismus)
To crack the secret messages that the Germans were sending with their new Geheimschreiber machine. This was a device that used rotating wheels to scramble the letters of the messages and was given the codename Tunny at Bletchley Park. Turingery was a way of finding out how
The wheels of Tunny were set up. He also introduced the Tunny team to Tommy Flowers who, with the help of Max Newman, built the Colossus computer, the world’s first computer that could be programmed and changed electronically, which took over from a simpler earlier machine
(the Heath Robinson), and which was much faster and could use math to decode the messages. Some people have wrongly said that Turing was a key figure in the design of the Colossus computer. Turingery and the math-based method of Banburismus certainly influenced the way
Of thinking about how to crack the Lorenz cipher, but he was not directly involved in the Colossus development. After working at Bell Labs in the US, Turing wanted to make phone conversations more secure by using electronic codes. Near the end of the war, he joined a secret radio service
At Hanslope Park. There, he learned more about electronics with the help of REME officer Donald Bayley. They built a small machine that could make voice messages safe from eavesdroppers. The machine was called Delilah. The machine could do many things, but it could not work
Well with long-distance radios. Delilah was finished too late to be used in the war. The machine worked well, and Turing showed it to the officials by making a Winston Churchill speech secret and then revealing it again. But Delilah was not used for anything. Turing
Also helped Bell Labs with SIGSALY, another system that made voice messages secure. SIGSALY was used in the last years of the war. Turing lived in Hampton, London, for two years from 1945 to 1947. He worked on designing
A new kind of computer called the ACE at a national science lab. He wrote a paper in February 1946 that explained how this computer would work. It was the first paper of its kind. Another scientist named Von Neumann had written a similar paper before, but it
Was not as good or as original as Turing’s. Turing had a good design for the ACE, but he could not tell anyone about it. This was because he had to keep secret his work during the war at Bletchley Park, where he helped
Crack enemy codes. This made him frustrated and unhappy. He left for Cambridge in late 1947 and took a break from his work. He wrote another paper about smart machines, but he did not publish it. While he was away, his colleagues built a smaller version of the
ACE. It ran its first program in May 1950. Many other computers later used some of its ideas. Turing never saw the full version of his ACE, which was built after he died. Turing met another computer pioneer named Konrad Zuse in Germany in 1947. Zuse had built
Some of the first computers in the world. They had a discussion with some other scientists from England and Germany. They talked about their work and their ideas. There is a book that tells more about this meeting. Turing got a job as a teacher in the math department at the University of Manchester
In 1948. The next year, he became the second-in-command of the computer lab there. He worked on making software for one of the first computers that could store programs in its memory. It was called the Manchester Mark 1. He wrote a manual for this computer and helped a company called
Ferranti make a better version of it. They paid him for his advice until he died. He also kept doing math research on his own. He wrote a paper in October 1950 about artificial intelligence. He asked if machines could think like humans. He suggested a way to test this
By having a human talk to a machine and a human without knowing which was which. If the machine could fool the human, it would pass the test. He also thought that it would be easier to make a machine that could learn like a child than to copy an adult mind. There
Is a test on the Internet that is based on Turing’s idea. It is called the CAPTCHA test. It tries to tell if the user is a human or a computer. Turing and his old classmate, D.G. Champernowne, started to create a chess program for a computer
That was not yet built in 1948. They finished the program in 1950 and called it the Turochamp. In 1952, he wanted to run it on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, but the computer was not powerful enough to do it. So Turing “played” the program by looking at the pages of the
Steps and following them on a chessboard. He took about 30 minutes for each move. The game was saved. Garry Kasparov, a famous chess player, said that Turing’s program “played a normal game of chess”. The program lost to Turing’s coworker Alick Glennie, but some people say that it beat Champernowne’s wife, Isabel.
Turing also made a test that was very important, clever, and long-lasting. It was about the discussion of artificial intelligence, which is still going on after more than 50 years. In 1951, when Turing was 39 years old, he became interested in how living things grow
Different shapes and patterns. He wrote a brilliant paper called “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” in January 1952. He proposed that the shapes and patterns of living things are caused by a system of chemicals that react with each other and spread out in space. He
Called this a reaction–diffusion system. He used some complicated math equations to describe how these chemical reactions work. For example, he said that if a chemical A helps another chemical reaction happen, and if that reaction makes more of chemical A,
Then we have a positive feedback loop that can be described by some special math equations. Turing found out that interesting patterns can be created if the chemical reaction also makes a chemical B that slows down the production of A. If A and B move around in the container
At different speeds, then we can have some areas where A is more and some where B is more. To figure out how much of A and B are in different areas, Turing needed a powerful computer, but he didn’t have one in 1951, so he had to use simpler math equations to
Solve them by hand. His calculations gave him the right kind of results, and he got, for example, a mixture that had regular red spots in it. A Russian scientist named Boris Belousov did some experiments that showed similar results, but he couldn’t publish
His papers because people thought that this violated a law of physics. Belousov didn’t know about Turing’s paper in a famous scientific journal. Turing’s paper was published before people knew how DNA works, but his work on how living
Things grow shapes and patterns is still important today and is a very influential work in mathematical biology. One of the first uses of Turing’s paper was by James Murray who explained why cats have spots and stripes on their fur. More research in this area shows that Turing’s
Work can partly explain how living things grow “feathers, hair, lungs, and even why the heart is on the left side of the chest”. In 2012, some researchers found that in mice, if they remove some genes called Hox genes, the mice have more fingers or toes without
Having bigger limbs. This suggests that Hox genes control how many fingers or toes the mice have by changing the wavelength of a Turing-type system. Later papers were not published until a book called Collected Works of A. M. Turing came out in 1992.
A study in 2023 proved that Turing’s math model was right. The study was presented by the American Physical Society, and it involved growing chia seeds in flat trays, and changing how much water they had. The researchers changed some factors that appear in Turing’s math
Equations, and they got patterns that looked like those in nature. This is thought to be the first time that experiments with living plants have confirmed Turing’s math insight. In 1941, Turing asked his coworker Joan Clarke to marry him. They both worked on cracking
Codes during World War II. But soon after, Turing told Joan he was homosexual. She wasn’t bothered by this, but Turing felt he couldn’t marry her because of his feelings. Turing was 39 years old when he began dating Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old who did not have
A job. They met near a movie theater in Manchester a few days before Christmas and Turing asked him to have lunch with him. On 23 January, someone broke into Turing’s house. Murray said he knew the thief and Turing told the police what happened. The police found out
That Turing and Murray were lovers. This was illegal in the UK at that time, and they were both arrested for breaking the law. The first hearing for their trial was on 27 February. Turing’s lawyer did not try to defend him or prove that he was innocent. The hearing
Was in a court in Knutsford. Turing’s brother and lawyer convinced him to admit that he was guilty. The trial, called Regina v. Turing and Murray, was on 31 March 1952. Turing was found guilty and had to choose
Between going to jail or being on probation. If he chose probation, he had to agree to take medicine that would change his body and make him less interested in sex. This was called “chemical castration”. He chose to take the medicine, which was a fake female
Hormone. He had to take it for a year. The medicine made him unable to have sex and grow breasts. This made Turing’s words come true. He had said that he would become a different person, but he did not know who he would be. Murray was let go with a warning.
Turing’s arrest made him lose his permission to work on secret projects for the government. He could not continue his work on codes and ciphers for the GCHQ, the British agency that did spy work with computers. He started in 1946. He still had his job at the university.
His trial was soon after two British spies ran away to the Soviet Union in 1951. The government thought that homosexual people were not trustworthy and could be spies too. Turing could not go to the US after his arrest in 1952, but he could go to other countries
In Europe. He went to Norway in the summer of 1952. Norway was more accepting of homosexual people. He met many men there, including one named Kjell Carlson. Kjell wanted to visit Turing in the UK, but the government found out and stopped him from coming. Turing also
Started seeing a doctor, Dr Franz Greenbaum, who helped him with his mental health. They became good friends. On June 8, 1954, Turing’s housekeeper found him dead in his house at 43 Adlington Road, Wilmslow. That night, a doctor checked his body and said that he had died the day before,
At 41 years old, because of a poison called cyanide. Next to his bed, there was an apple with a bite taken out of it. No one checked if the apple had cyanide in it, but some people thought that Turing ate the apple to kill himself.
The next day, Turing’s brother John saw his body and agreed with what the doctor said, because he thought there was no way to prove that Turing did not mean to die. The same day, a court said that Turing killed himself on purpose. Two days later, on June 12, 1954,
Turing’s body was burned at Woking Crematorium with only three people there. His ashes were spread in the gardens of the crematorium, like his father’s. Turing’s mother was on vacation in Italy when he died and came back after the court. She did not believe that Turing killed himself.
Two people who wrote books about Turing, Andrew Hodges and David Leavitt, guessed that Turing was copying a scene from his favorite movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), made by Walt Disney. They both said that Turing liked the scene where the evil queen dips her apple in a poison.
A philosopher named Jack Copeland did not agree with what the court said. He gave another reason for how Turing died: he breathed in cyanide gas from a machine that he used to make spoons shiny with gold. The machine used a chemical called potassium cyanide to melt
The gold. Turing had this machine in a very small room in his house. Copeland said that the doctor’s report matched better with breathing in poison than eating poison. Turing also usually ate an apple before going to sleep, and sometimes he did not finish it.
Also, Turing did not seem sad or angry before he died. He had some problems with the law and his body, but he did not care. He even made a list of things that he wanted to do when he came back to work after the weekend. Turing’s mother thought that Turing ate
The poison by mistake, because he did not keep his chemicals in a safe place. The book writer Andrew Hodges thought that Turing did not want anyone to know how he died, especially his mother. Some people thought that Turing was unhappy because he believed in fortune-telling. When
He was young, a fortune-teller told him that he would be very smart. In May 1954, a month before he died, Turing went to see another fortune-teller with the Greenbaum family. The Greenbaums’ daughter, Barbara, said: But it was a lovely sunny day and Alan was in a cheerful mood and off we went… Then
He thought it would be a good idea to go to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool. We found a fortune-teller’s tent and Alan said he’d like to go in[,] so we waited around for him to come back… And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into a pale, shaking, horror-stricken
Face. Something had happened. We don’t know what the fortune-teller said but he obviously was deeply unhappy. I think that was probably the last time we saw him before we heard of his suicide. In 2009, a British computer expert named John Graham-Cumming asked the British government
To say sorry for punishing Turing because he was homosexual. More than 30,000 people agreed with him and signed his petition. The prime minister, Gordon Brown, said he was sorry and admitted that Turing was treated very badly: Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition
Of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened
To him … So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better. In December 2011, William Jones and his local representative, John Leech, started an online
Campaign asking the British government to forgive Turing for his conviction of “gross indecency”: We ask the HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of “gross indecency”. In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” with another man and was forced
To undergo so-called “organo-therapy”—chemical castration. Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just 41. Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he’d done so much to save. This remains a shame on the British government
And British history. A pardon can go some way to healing this damage. It may act as an apology to many of the other homosexual men, not as well-known as Alan Turing, who were subjected to these laws. More than 37,000 people signed the petition and John Leech, a member of Parliament from
Manchester, gave it to the Parliament. But Justice Minister Lord McNally did not support the petition and said: A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offense. He would have known that his offense was against the
Law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offense that now seems both cruel and absurd—particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such,
Long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.
John Leech did not give up. He was a politician in Manchester, where Turing worked, from 2005 to 2015. He tried many times to make the Parliament forgive Turing. He said Turing was a hero for helping to win the war and it was shameful that he was still a criminal. Many famous
Scientists, like Stephen Hawking, supported him. When a movie about Turing’s life, The Imitation Game, came out in Britain, the people who made the movie thanked Leech for making people care about Turing and getting him forgiven. Leech is now known as the person who made
Turing’s pardon possible. He also helped to get pardons for 75,000 other people who were punished for being homosexual. In 2012, a new law was proposed in the House of Lords, which is part of the Parliament, to forgive Turing by law for his crime of being homosexual. He was found guilty of this
Crime in 1952. Later that year, Stephen Hawking and 10 other important people wrote a letter to a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, asking the prime minister, David Cameron, to agree with the law. The government said yes, and the law passed in the House of Lords in October.
In 2013, the law had to be approved by the House of Commons, which is another part of the Parliament. But a politician named Christopher Chope said no, and the law was stopped. The law was supposed to be discussed again in 2014, but the government decided to do something
Else. On 24 December 2013, the Queen signed a paper that said Turing was forgiven for his crime of being homosexual, right away. The person in charge of the law, Lord Chancellor Chris Grayling, said Turing should be remembered and praised for his amazing work in the war,
And not for his crime. The Queen officially said Turing was forgiven in August 2014. The Queen’s action was very rare. It was only the fourth time she did this since the end of the Second World War. Usually, the Queen only forgives people who are innocent or who
Have family or friends who ask for it. Turing did not have either of these things. In 2016, the government said it wanted to clear the names of other men who were punished in the past for being homosexual, like Alan Turing. This became known as the “Alan Turing
Law”. The Alan Turing law is a nickname for a law in the UK that says sorry to men who were warned or jailed for loving other men, when it was illegal to do so. The law only works in England and Wales.
On 19 July 2023, after the UK Government said sorry to LGBT veterans, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Turing should get a statue that stays forever on one of the empty stands in Trafalgar Square. He said Dr Turing was “probably the best war hero, in my opinion,
Of the Second World War, who helped end the war sooner, saved many lives, and fought against the Nazis. And his story is a sad story of how people treated him badly.” 2012 was the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth. He was a brilliant mathematician and
Computer scientist who helped shape the modern world. To honor him, a group of people from different universities and museums organized many events throughout the year. They called it Alan Turing Year. The group was led by a mathematician named S. B. Clarke and Turing’s nephew John D. Turing.
On June 23, 2012, Google changed its logo on its website to look like a Turing machine. This was a device that Turing invented to perform calculations. The logo also had a mini-game where you could create your own instructions for the machine.
A company called Winning Moves Ltd. made a special chess game about Alan Turing. The game had pieces and cards that showed different aspects of Turing’s life, from his birth in Meudon to his work at Hut 8, a secret code-breaking facility. The game also had a copy of a chess
Game that Turing’s teacher’s son made by hand. Turing played this game in the 1950s. ACM is a group of people who study and work on computers. They had two big meetings in June, one in Manchester for three days and one in San Francisco for two days. In Cambridge,
There were two events to celebrate the birthday and the legacy of Turing, who was a famous computer scientist and mathematician. He was born 100 years ago. One event was at King’s College, where he studied, and the other was at the University of Cambridge, where another group of computer scientists helped to organize it.
The Science Museum in London had a free show from June 2012 to July 2013 to show people what Turing did and why he was important. In February 2012, Royal Mail made a special stamp with Turing’s picture on it, to honor him as one of the great British people. The
Torch relay for the 2012 London Olympics passed by Turing’s statue in Sackville Gardens on 23 June 2012, which was his birthday. On 22 June 2012, Manchester City Council and the Lesbian and Gay Foundation created the Alan Turing Memorial Award. This award is given to people and groups who have done a
Lot to fight against homophobia in Manchester. Homophobia is when people are afraid of or hate gay people. At the University of Oxford, they started a new course that combines computer science and philosophy. This was to remember Turing’s 100th birthday, because he was interested in both subjects.
There have been many other events to celebrate Turing’s life and achievements, such as one at the University of Manchester on 5 June 2004. This event was organized by two groups of people who study logic and the history of mathematics. Logic is a branch of mathematics that deals with reasoning and arguments.