Alan Mathison Turing OBE, FRS (1912 - 1954)

Today’s story of a classy gent, the winner of the Facebook vote on our page involves a shameful aspect of British history, and his tale ultimately ends in tragedy.  However, far be it for Classy Gents to censor on behalf of the state, Alan Turing has changed the world in a massive way through his remarkable life not once, but twice.

Described as “mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist” by Wikipedia, this is clearly a man with some serious numerical tekkers.  Achieving his first class degree in maths from Cambridge in 1934, he was elected a fellow after his dissertation proved the central limit theorem, aged 22. If you aren’t au fait with statistical methods, the CLT is kind of a big deal.  A true indication of the era this man lived in (and perhaps some laziness in writing his dissertation), is that he managed to prove the theorem absent of the knowledge it had been proved 13 years previously. Continuing to apparently ignore any work that had gone before him, he then reproved the Entscheidungsproblem was unsolvable. This was to be the basis for his work on computing, his “Turing machines” being able to solve any problem that is computable.  

Then those pesky Nazis showed up and with the start of the war, Bletchley Park was bought by “Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party” also known as MI6. It was transformed it to  the centre of the intelligence war.  He designed five machines used to decode the messages the bad guys sent, the British versions of the Polish “Bombe” cryptanalytic machines. Having already made what his colleague Jack Good said was Turing’s most important contribution, he settled down to take on the naval Enigma. Which Turing’s contributions hugely sped up the solving of: they had to be regularly resolved as codes were changed to throw the allies off. Through these contributions Nazi communications were regularly intercepted, clearly improving the allies’ chances massively in the campaign.

At the end of the war Turing helped develop the world’s first electronic computer which could store a program, the SSEM made at the University of Manchester (although whether this was just a proof of concept is debated). His work on artificial intelligence was similarly groundbreaking and even today those annoying CAPTCHA tests are known as reverse Turing tests (the Turing test was a method to see if a computer was intelligent enough to fool a human interrogator into thinking it was human).

While working at Bletchley Park Turing was so important his activities as a practicing homosexual (which was sadly illegal at the time) were swept under the cover by his colleagues, who didn’t seem to care, and certainly didn’t care enough to forgo his astounding work.  After the war, in 1952, he was prosecuted for ‘gross indecency’ having mentioned a homosexual relationship to the police while reporting a break in at his house. He went to trial, and did not deny his actions or defend himself. He simply stated that he did not believe that what he was doing was wrong, and was more concerned about being open about his sexuality, even in the unsympathetic environment and society in which he lived. Upon being found guilty of this ‘crime’, he was offered two alternatives: go to jail, or accept ‘treatment’; he chose the latter was chemically castrated by injections of oestrogen, which would have caused violent mood swings and distressing physical changes to his body, aside from the barbaric intended effect of killing his libido.

In the years following his conviction, Turing’s conviction meant that he was denied security clearance for the highly classified work that he had loved doing - he was able to confide only in a single friend that he bitterly resented this.

In 1954 Turing was found dead at home, by his cleaner. He had eaten an apple, traditionally a symbol of forbidden love, which he had poisoned with cyanide. Despite the official coroner’s verdict of suicide, he had deliberately tried to make his death look accidental, in order to relieve his mother of the stigma and prosecution then associated with suicide (which was also illegal at that point).

It was not until 2009, more than half a century after his tragic conviction, ‘treatment’ and death, that the British government, prompted by a 30,000 signature petition, apologised for their barbaric and appalling actions towards Alan Turing. 

Today’s classy gent is a man who made huge technological contributions in the war against Nazi Germany and shaped the future of the free society he’d helped to save through his academic achievements. Alan Turing was a man of eccentricities: a man who would sometimes run the 40 miles to London at world class pace, a man who would wear a gas mask to avoid hay fever in the summer.  But more importantly he was a brilliant mathematician and pioneering computer scientist. Blazing a trail for a country where simply being himself was a crime, Alan Turing is your classy gent for today.