Alan Turing

As Andy Sullivan points out, today is the late Alan Turing's birthday. For those of you who don't know, Turing is the godfather of computer science. He remains to the this day the greatest scientist in the field, above even McCarthy, Knuth, and Dijkstra. His Turing Test launched the field of Artificial Intelligence. His Turing Machine concept revolutionized computer theory. And, perhaps most consequential to our everyday lives, his cracking of the Nazi Enigma encoder was crucial in defeating Hitler. Turing is revered by all computer scientists and programmers; indeed, the Turing Award is considered the Nobel Prize of computing, having been given to luminaries such as Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Alan Kay. However, he wasn't as respected by the British government. He was tried and convicted of sodomy for being gay, and was forced to take libido-reducing hormones. He eventually gave himself a deadly dose of cyanide, though his mother insisted that he was murdered. This was a man who revolutionized the world we live in, yet was destroyed, and kept from bettering the world further, by homophobic legislation. I hope that the Republican party keeps that in mind the next time the FMA comes up for a vote.

Comments

[Greg Kuperberg]

I completely agree with you that Britain treated Alan Turing very badly and shamefully. (I think that the British government agrees with you as well now, although I have not found a good reference.) I also agree that Alan Turing was a great researcher and the founder of computer science. But it is not quite true that he "remains the greatest researcher in the field".

Science is not really like professional chess or tennis; there is no overarching contest to see who is the "greatest", even though it is sometimes portrayed that way. But even if you naively imagined such comparisons, you would have to acknowledge John von Neumann as Turing's equal among computer scientists in that period. (Indeed, back then they were logicians, and you could almost count Godel too.)

It is true that some fields are sometimes dominated by a single towering figure -- like Einstein in theoretical physics for 20 years or so. As it happens, computer science never quite had an Einstein figure. Even its theoretical branch, complexity theory, never quite did. I think that that's just as well.

[Minipundit]

I'm not an expert in the field, obviously, and you would know much more about this than I. But it seems to me that his contributions were more influential than any other single person. Is this very meaningful? Of course not. But I figured any praise of Turing is good.

[Greg Kuperberg]

The person who begins a field can always claim to be the most influential person in that field. You say that Turing revolutionized computer theory, but that is not quite it; he actually began computer theory. In that sense, it is not possible for any other computer scientist, no matter how brilliant or productive, to be as influential as Turing.

Even Turing himself could not be as influential in his later years as he was in his 20s. In fact, when he died, and even when he was arrested, he was not as influential as a number of other people. In particular he was not as influential as von Neumann, who, more than anyone else, put Turing's great theoretical ideas into practice.

For that matter, Turing was not first or last in the Enigma project; he came in the middle. This was highly joint work and it is a mistake to attribute it all to Turing or even mainly to Turing, although he was certainly one of the best people there.

[Minipundit]

Anyway, he created computer science and helped crack the Enigma code. Good accomplishments for a lifetime, no?

[Greg Kuperberg]

Oh sure, we can only dream of having a career like that.

To confirm your original point, I have witnessed that computer programmers who happen to be homophobes have trouble believing that Alan Turing was gay. American computer programmers, that is, since most educated British people reformed on this issue a long time ago.

[Minipundit]

I'm surprised that they had even heard of Alan Turing, frankly. He's known in Comp Sci, obviously, but I don't think of him as having the same stature among regular programmers. Sort of strange; it's a bit like engineers not knowing who Newton was.

[Greg Kuperberg]

Many computer programmers, maybe most of them, were at least CS majors in college. Many CS courses mention Turing from time to time. And so do many other forums -- who doesn't enjoy talking about the Turing test?