Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 11th Sep 2009 20:18 UTC
The British government has issued an official apology for the treatment Alan Turing received after WWII. "The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the 'appalling' way he was treated for being gay. Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of 'gross indecency' in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. Gordon Brown's statement came in response to a petition posted on the Number 10 website which has received thousands of signatures in recent months."
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Member since:
2005-07-08
While Turing is considered favorably today and the apology is long overdue, what about all the other forgotten heroes of British computing during those war days.
If you read up on the people at Bletchely Park that actually built the code cracking machines and later computing machines, you will find some interesting tidbits from the trenches. All of these engineers were forced to keep their mouths shut for fear of severe retribution from the state for 50 years.
Some of the lead engineers say they never even heard of AT, or vaguely remember him popping around the lab on occasion. From that I gather that AT is not the father of hardware computing at all, just one of many academics in the field who had a more infamous history perhaps because of his short life but also because of the famous theorems.
If AT had never existed we might not have those theories and would be the poorer for it, but we would certainly still have the computing hardware we have today. His work really only effected the theoretical side of CS.