The (Gay) Father of Computer Science
Image via The New York Times
As highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, Alan Mathison Turing is considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, whose ideas led to the early version of modern computing and contributed to the win of World War II. Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in an upper-middle-class family.
He is seen as a symbol for some gay inventors; he lived during a time where homosexuality was criminalized by Britain.
At a young age, science and math were always the passion for young Turing. He didn't receive good grades during his time as a student. He was nearly stopped from taking the national school certificates exams for math and sciences because of fear that he would fail. During his time at King’s College, he focused on his studies and passion for probability theory and mathematical theory. While at King's College, he became increasingly aware of his identity as a gay man.
In 1936, Turing published a paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," which is the precursor to the modern computer. He then spent two years at Princeton University to pursue his Ph.D. in mathematics before getting back to Cambridge. He would take a part-time position at Government Code and Cypher school. His contributions were not widely recognized until World War II, when he was a leading member of the war code-breaking team at Bletchley Park, where he made five advanced contributions in cryptographic analysis, including bomber identification, an electromechanical device used to help decode German Enigma encrypted signals.
Moreover, Turing's contributions to the code-breaking process didn’t stop there. He also wrote two important papers regarding mathematical approaches to code-breaking, which became important assets to the Code and Cypher School. Turing then moved to London in the mid-1940 and began to work for the National Physical Laboratory. During that time, one of his striking contributions was his leadership of the design work for the Automatic Computing Engine and ultimately created a ground-breaking blueprint for store-program computers.
Despite the final version never being completed, it has been used worldwide by tech corporations for several years. In his paper published in 1950, he first addressed the issue of artificial intelligence and proposed an experiment known as the “Turing Test” — an effort to create an intelligence design standard for the tech industry. Over the past several decades, the test has significantly influenced debates over artificial intelligence.
The talented scientist may have committed suicide; he passed away in the early 1950s, after being arrested and went through several chemical castrations for being gay. Despite his death, his scientific contributions and his courage in the face of prosecution will live on.
“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”