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.
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.