Late great engineers: Alan Turing

Dozens of academic and technical departments worldwide are named after Turing. Winston Churchill famously said that Turing had made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. The biopic based on his life – The imitation game – was the highest-grossing independent movie of 2014. Accolades for the British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, computer scientist and mathematical biologist are endless. The blue plaque at his birthplace in London’s Maida Vale simply reads “founder of computer science and cryptographer”. But none of these fully encapsulate the enigmatic and complex scientist that seemed to pack so much into his short life of 41 years.

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Born in 23 June 1912, there was nothing specific in Alan Mathison Turing’s circumstances that predicted a path into a life of science. His father was in the Indian civil service, while his uncle HD Turing was an authority on trout fishing. Perhaps a hint of what was to come lies more in his mother’s side, in the form of physicist George Johnstone Stoney, a distant relative famous for introducing the word ‘electron’ as “the fundamental unity quantity of electricity”. But, for the main part, the Turings followed the professions, notably the law. According to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing’s childhood was largely that of being fostered in English homes with his brother while his parents were away in India. It was an existence in which “nothing encouraged expression, originality, or discovery. Science for him was an extra-curricular passion, first shown in primitive chemistry experiments. But he was given, and read, later commenting on its seminal influence, a popular book called Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know. An unpromising career at the ancient and exalted Sherborne School resulted in his headmaster reporting: “If he is to be solely a scientific specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school.”