“The legacy of (Alan) Turing the mathematician rises above any possible sensationalism. His contributions were supremely elegant and foundational. He gifted us with wild leaps of invention, including much mathematical underpinnings of digital computation. The highest award in computer science, our Nobel Prize, is name for him.
Turing the cultural figure must be acknowledged, however. The thing to understand is that he was one of the great heroes of WWII. He was the first “cracker,” a person who uses computers to defeat an enemy’s security measures. He applied one of the first computers to break a Nazi secret code, called Enigma, which Nazi mathematicians had believed was unbreakable. Enigma was decoded by the Nazis in the field using a mechanical device about the size of a cigar box. Turing reconceived it as a pattern of bits that could be analyzed in a computer, and cracked it wide open. Who know what world we be living in today if Turing had not succeeded?
The second thing to know about Turing is that he was gay at a time when it was illegal to be gay. British authorities, thinking they were doing the most compassionate thing, coerced him into a quack medical treatment that was supposed to correct his homosexuality. It consisted, bizarrely, of massive infusions of female hormones.
In order to understand how someone could have come up with that plan, you have to remember that before computers came along, the steam engine was a preferred metaphor for understanding human nature. All that sexual pressure was building up and causing the machine to malfunction, so the opposite essence, the female kind, ought to balance it out and reduce pressure. . . . Turing developed breasts and other female characteristics and became terribly depressed. He committed suicide by lacking an apple with cyanide in his lab and eating it.
Excerpted from Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” pp 29-30.
According to Wikipedia (accessed Feb 4, 2010):
Some suggest that Turing’s suicide was a re-enactment of “a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, pointing out that he took “an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the wicked witch immerses her apple in the poisonous brew.”
According to Wikipedia (accessed Feb 4, 2010):
“In August 2009, John Graham-Cumming started a petition urging the British Government to posthumously apologise to Alan Turing for prosecuting him as a homosexual. The petition received thousands of signatures. Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged the petition, releasing a statement on 10 September 2009 apologising and describing Turing’s treatment as “appalling.”"
According to the Introduction of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson:
“At one point I (Isaacson) emailed (Jobs) to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. . . .”