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Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician
who made trailblazing contributions
to the fields of math, computing, and even AI.
Most famously, he was able to break German secret codes
during World War II.
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He was also a gay man in a time and place where government
still discriminated heavily against gay people,
even people who saved their country from annihilation.
As a young kid, Turing showed early signs of genius.
He taught himself to read in just three weeks
and was enamored by numbers from the moment
he learned what they are.
He would break his toys just to try and figure out
how to fix them.
By six years old, Alan was already
in elite private schools and eventually attended
the University of Cambridge where he was a top student.
Still looking to learn, Turing moved to Princeton University
in New Jersey to get his PhD.
Around that time, Turing really started
to flex his brawny brain.
He published a paper where he laid out
a theoretical computing device called a Turing machine.
The paper was highly influential and is now considered
the start of computer science.
That's impressive enough but Alan Turing
was just getting started.
Two years later, he left Princeton
and went back to England as war was beginning
to break out across Europe.
He joined the British government's codebreaking
department, where he was part of a team working to decode
the Enigma machine, which was the state-of-the-art cipher
that encrypted all German communication during the war.
It was thought to be so secure that even the absolute, most
top secret messages were sent through the Enigma machine.
But that didn't stop Turing and the rest of the team
from working tirelessly to crack the code.
With big budgets and a full team of mathematicians,
Turing designed a new machine called
the Bombe, which could decrypt German messages
on an industrial scale.
This was a major breakthrough.
Those secret codes played a huge role
in helping the Allies win the war against Nazi Germany.
Experts estimate Turing's machines
may have saved more than two million lives
by shortening World War II.
Despite all the success, things took a terrible turn for Turing
in 1952 and for a disturbing reason.
He was arrested for being gay.
That's right.
As horrible as it sounds, it was actually
illegal to be gay in Britain until 1967
when the unjust practice was laid to rest.
Turing had done nothing wrong, yet he
was being tried and treated like a criminal.
Instead of giving in, Alan Turing stood up for himself,
refusing to apologize since he had absolutely nothing
to be sorry for.
The British government came down on him hard.
Because of his criminal record, Turing
lost security clearance, which meant
he couldn't keep working with the codebreaking team.
He avoided jail by agreeing to treatments
that made him infertile.
He was routinely followed and harassed by police.
Until just two years after his arrest,
Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning in his bed.
Next to him was a partially eaten apple, which
was laced with the poison.
To this day, no one can say for sure what happened.
Did Turing really take his life?
Was there an accident or maybe even a murder?
No matter the explanation, one thing was clear.
It was a tragic end for a brilliant man who was cruelly
cast aside by the very country he helped save,
just because of who he loved.
Today, Turing remains a proud gay icon.
He has statues, memorials, and even a prestigious award
named after him.
He's even set to appear on England's 50-pound note too.
And that's not all.
He finally received a royal pardon from the queen in 2013,
a full 60 years after his conviction.
The Alan Turing law was also passed
in 2017, which pardoned all men convicted
of the same unfair charges as Turing.
He's remembered as an LGBTQ+ pioneer who bravely refused
to apologize for who he was and remained true to himself until
the very end.
And that's pretty cool, even for science.
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