Posted on 03/25/2021 7:43:31 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
The design of the bank note was unveiled before it is set to be formally issued to the public on June 23, Turing’s birthday. The 50-pound note is the most valuable denomination in circulation but is little used during everyday transactions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic as digital exchanges increasingly replaced the use of cash.
The new note, which is laden with high-level security features, completes the bank’s rejig of its stable of paper currencies over the past few years. Turing’s image joins that of Winston Churchill on the five-pound note, novelist Jane Austen on the 10-pound note and artist J. M. W. Turner on the 20-pound note. All the notes are made from polymer rather than paper, which means they should last longer and remain in better condition through their use.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
—”Then he said “I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”
Thank you, that was sometimes the answer my wife received from her coworker. And I wondered if she had phrased the question differently...
—”The Poles did the original work, “
YES!!!
And many others, pls see the link in #19.
Why ... is he queer ?
Not any more...he’s dead.
Duhhh ... I just read his complete bio ... yup ... 3 pound note.
Absolutely right. It was disgraceful, but another time, another place.
My favorite podcast is a BBC production called "In Our Time." The host Melvyn Bragg brings on brilliant guests, usually three during an episode, to discuss a topic. The guests are all experts on the selected topic. I love to play these in the car whenever I'm driving on a long trip or on errands about town. They are available on Apple Podcasts or from BBC itself.
The topic on October 15, 2020 was Alan Turing. The podcast is excellent -- all about Turing's life, his brilliant work, his awkward social life, and his tragic end. Highly recommended.
BBC Podcast: Alan Turing
Apple Podcast: Alan Turing
Podcast blurb: "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alan Turing (1912-1954) whose 1936 paper On Computable Numbers effectively founded computer science. Immediately recognised by his peers, his wider reputation has grown as our reliance on computers has grown. He was a leading figure at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, using his ideas for cracking enemy codes, work said to have shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives. That vital work was still secret when Turing was convicted in 1952 for having a sexual relationship with another man for which he was given oestrogen for a year, or chemically castrated. Turing was to kill himself two years later. The immensity of his contribution to computing was recognised in the 1960s by the creation of the Turing Award, known as the Nobel of computer science, and he is to be the new face on the £50 note.">
Related from a few days ago: Nazi Operated Enigma Machine Retrieved In Baltic Sea.
Yes, Alan Turing was queer. He was also one of the most important mathematicians of all time, and absolutely instrumental to the modern understanding of computers and computation. His Turing Machines (from the 1930s) are a paper model of computation that capture exactly everything that any modern conventional computer can or ever will be able to do.
I listening to the program now- excellent!
Glad you like it!
The entire podcast series is consistently excellent. I enjoy listening to episodes about topics that I know nothing about and never thought I’d care to learn about.
The topics are so widely varied, too. I just listened to “The Devonian Extinction” episode and found it wonderfully fascinating.
Yes, I’ll be checking some other topics.
Yes, his 1937 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is the foundational paper that defined computer science.
He saw early on the value of RISC over CISC hardware.
He quipped that “The Americans are always eager to solve problems by increasing the complexity of the hardware rather than doing it in software”
He recognized that the German Enigma had a fatal flaw in the handling of it’s translation from the machine-generated, pseudo-random characters to encrypted text. The flaw was never encoding a character as itself....a very powerful crib that decoders could use was due to this flaw.
Enigma was a mechanical method of utilizing the only encryption form that is mathematically provable to be secure... it is simple XOR encryption. It is indeed unbreakable by any means other than having the actual key (which is exactly the same length as the plaintext...and thus rather unwieldy)
I have done work in the field and I can tell you that Turing
is held in very high esteem.... it is a pity he died at such a young age...there is no telling what the man would have accomplished.
The only other figure that comes close to being his equal is Claude Shannon. Shannon was an American Electrical Engineer, cryptographer and Mathematician. His 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” is nearly as important as Turing’s 1937 paper.
The Turing machines are ingenious given the then state of the art.
I remember as a young engineering student struggling to learn electronics. Of all things, it was a fluid power class where we made a functional color sign board completely out of pneumatic components that everything clicked.
My first visit to a central telephone office using Strowger switching technology was also a huge watershed for me conceptually. Once I had a physical model I could reference in my mind, I was able to easily understand how call routing worked.
I began with PDP-11’s we bootstrapped by hand and now I have a multi-core computer w/ 256gb in my pocket.
—”I began with PDP-11”
A guy I knew had a PDP-11 in his basement, yes he was a bit computer nutty.
But he got it for free!
I think he could echo “HELLO WORLD” to the terminal?
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