Trolling the news feeds this morning, I learned that yesterday, June 23, was an important day in GLBT history–and geek history, too. For yesterday was the birthday of Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptologist whose work during World War II cracked the Nazi’s secret code and put a major nail in the Axis coffin. He was also directly responsible for computing as we know it. And he was gay. I’d write a homage to the man myself, but Robert Dumas has already done so–and far more eloquently than I could ever do:
Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912. He developed theories in the 1920s about a “digital computer” which would be a machine that could answer just about any mathematical problem. He helped crack the Enigma code. He is the father of computer science. He was persecuted (and prosecuted) for his homosexuality. He committed suicide just before his fifty-second birthday by eating a poisoned apple. He is the biggest single reason—more than Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates—that you are reading this very sentence.
— via RobertDumas.org, courtesy of BB
(FYI: Tyler penned a great bio for Mr. Turing over at GLBTQ.com. Totally worth your time.)
There was a brilliant, if rather stagy, Masterpiece Theatre biopic of Mr. Turing called Breaking the Code made in 1996 with an outstanding cast that included Derek “Claw-Claw-Claudius!” Jacobi, Prunella Scales (of Mapp and Lucia fame), and one of the 20th century’s most important playwrights-cum-actors, Harold Pinter. If you haven’t seen it, a very industrious young man has hacked it to bits and posted it to YouTube. Episode 1 starts here:
Enjoy your daily computing, courtesy of the Gays.
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