She was a sharp old bird that worked to a very ripe old age. Unfortunately, she always said, they had taken an oath to NEVER discuss their work, and she never said anything.
Think what you will, what they did to Turing was simply wrong. Even if he had been a nobody.
It is actually doubtful that Turing committed suicide via a cyanide apple.
The apple was never tested for cyanide.
His housekeeper said he ate an apple every night before going to bed and always left the core on the dresser.
Sounds like the kind of investigation/incrimination our FBI/KGB would perform.
The West and the free world as a whole owes this man. Say what you will about his sexual identity but without his skills we could have lived in a much different world.
The West and the free world as a whole owes this man. Say what you will about his sexual identity but without his skills we could have lived in a much different world.
The Imitation Game was an excellent movie.
The interview scene between Charles Dance (Adm Dennison) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Turing) was classic English irony and humor.
We visited Bletchley Park a few years ago- very interesting
There’s a cryptological museum at Fort Meade in Maryland. It’s actually more interesting than I expected it to be.
One display was about three linguists. They sounded like absolute linguistic idiot savants. I’m guess they found these guys in some institution and not through a newspaper ad.
One of them, in the late 1950’s was reading about some action in Vietnam and thought that the US might be getting involved there. So he went home and taught himself Vietnamese one weekend so he could translate intercepts.
This was the man who really defeated Rommel and prevented the Germans from seizing the Suez canal.If that had happened Turkey would have joined the Axis and eventually Germany and Japan would have linked up in Northern India.
My uncle passed away a couple years ago at age 99. He was at the university studying mechanical engineering when he joined the army in WW II and was sent to Oak Ridge to run a shift of local boys enriching uranium. He went on to machining plutonium bomb cores at Los Alamos. When he was about 95 or so, we were discussing his work during and after the war and I asked him about the machining tolerances. He paused for a couple seconds and I thought he was trying to remember something from so long ago. Then he said “I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”
To all
The Poles did the original work, which includes clandestinely stealing an early Engima. UK likes to convienently forget that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Bureau_(Poland)
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.
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.