17 August 2009 · petition, turing

Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

The world might have benefited from his ideas considerably more had the prudish (and, as it turned out, probably hypocritical) authorities at the time not hounded him to an early grave because of his homosexuality.

We should think before we cast the first stone, as we do not know where the universe pivots.

This story has been considerably edited, as I must acknowledge the force of my critics' remarks. The original was intemperate and, well, unoriginal so I decided to remove the call to read and sign a petition and simply make my own statement about how Turing, one of the seminal intellectual leaders of the 20th century, was treated by an unthinking populace allowing the irresponsible authorities to act "in their name". The first paragraph is from the petition.