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From the Beeb.
Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing will feature on the new design of the Bank of England's £50 note.
He is celebrated for his code-cracking work that proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.
The £50 note will be the last of the Bank of England collection to switch from paper to polymer when it enters circulation by the end of 2021.
The note was once described as the "currency of corrupt elites" and is the least used in daily transactions.
However, there are still 344 million £50 notes in circulation, with a combined value of £17.2bn, according to the Bank of England's banknote circulation figures.
The work of Alan Turing, who was educated in Sherborne, Dorset, helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German Naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine. Less celebrated is the pivotal role he played in the development of early computers, first at the National Physical Laboratory and later at the University of Manchester.
In 2013, he was given a posthumous royal pardon for his 1952 conviction for gross indecency following which he was chemically castrated. He had been arrested after having an affair with a 19-year-old Manchester man.
The Bank said his legacy continued to have an impact on science and society today.
Not as good as a $20, but the least you can do when your government drove a brilliant logician and computer designer to a premature suicide. Rest in Peace, Alan Turing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:12PM (7 children)
More deserving then some old King or Queen (no phun intended) as per normal (the queen is on one side of all bills). That said I still find it somewhat annoying that it seems Turing gets all the credits, he is pretty much the only one they ever mention, and then they immediately play the 'gay-card' and it's somehow extra sad. It was the law at the time I'm sure there was a bunch of other homos that didn't exactly have a gay old time either.
It's almost a surprise they have not bitched more about it being the £50 note (it's the largest note they have in circulation), as they mention it gets very little normal usage. It's the government shunning him again probably ...
That said where is the bill of Gordon Welchman? He got utterly shafted by the government to after his service at Bletchley Park, he wrote a book in the early 1980's (so a good 35-40 years after the war) about his work at Hut 6 and the government didn't like that as they didn't want their super secret ideas about metadata and traffic analysis leaking out to the world -- something he developed for them during ww2. Nobody feeling sad for him, or most people probably don't even know who he was. But without him Turings machine wouldn't have worked and would have been a massive paperweight and an utter failure since it would have been to slow to work to be of any actual use.
Marian Rejewski more or less faded into oblivion but eventually got a stamp, or something such, in Poland long after the war. Without him there wouldn't even been any kind of Enigma cracking, or they would have had to start from zero.
Something something standing on the shoulders of giants.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:37PM (4 children)
Yeah, probably because it IS extra sad.
Couldn't publish a book because of gov't secrets. VS. Imprisoned and subjected to cruel and unusual punishment for something he had no control over, ultimately leading to suicide.
Which one is more sad?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday July 17 2019, @12:11AM (2 children)
The thing is there had been other books published about BP before his. There had been several people before him that had talked about their work and experiences at BP in papers, interviews and books. They never got the punishment he did.
That said I'm not saying that it didn't suck for Turing but it was the law, Britain wasn't exactly the only land with similar laws at the time. But he decided on chemical castration himself, instead of going to prison -- don't recall now but I don't think it was a very long sentence. But castration wasn't forced upon him, he had choices and picked castration. Being aware of all associated risks involved.
He could have, and was, getting away with being gay, it was not really a massive secret according to the people that knew him. He was quite open about it and people didn't mind or care. The relationship with a much younger man sort of escalated as the man burglarized his home, he in turn reported it to the police and they found out about the whole homosexual relationship and then it was sort of out of their hands, as the law was what the law was, and that is how the whole situation came about. So they didn't really persecute or hunt him down to punish him. He more or less outed himself to the police that had to uphold the law -- horrible and stupid as it might have been or appear by the standards of today.
Which is more sad? Isn't one ruined life about as good, or bad, as the next one? They both made choices that broke the law and was punished for it. Possibly stupid laws by our standards today but still the law.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday July 17 2019, @12:32AM
Is having a security clearance revoked really on the same level as castration? We can recognise two things as being unfortunate without claiming that they are equally unfortunate.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:24AM
"it was the law" is the reason they are now putting him on the money. It's Britain's way of saying loudly that the country was wrong. If Turing chose castration instead of prison, he was probably shamed into it.
I'm certain that many more people were harmed by anti-gay laws and sentiments than laws about government secrets.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:48AM
Being on the currency should be less about who you are and what you did. I prefer to be in awe of someone's achievements when I see currency than feel bad about something terrible happening to someone.
Same thing is happening in the US with the whole quest to find a woman to put on a denomination of currency. I have nothing against having a woman on our currency, but the way the government is going about it is insulting. "We need to find a woman to put on the currency" is a much different argument than "X woman SHOULD be on the currency because of their outstanding achievements and benefit to the US".
(Score: 3, Touché) by deimtee on Wednesday July 17 2019, @03:56AM
No worries. It will get more usage when £50 buys a pint.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 17 2019, @04:58PM
All the "credits" for what? The Enigma machine cracking? Yeah, he certainly wasn't the only one working at that stuff.
But Turing also is known for a LOT of other amazing stuff. In addition to his well-known ideas like Turing machines [wikipedia.org] and the woefully misunderstood Turing Test [wikipedia.org], there's other stuff named after him like "Turing completeness" and Turing patterns [wikipedia.org]. He also made significant contributions to computability theory, introducing the concept of Turing reduction [wikipedia.org], as well as publishing some important proofs [wikipedia.org] dealing with Hilbert's 10th problem (the Entscheidungsproblem [wikipedia.org]), an essential result in decision theory and computation.
Turing should get a lot of credit for coming up with this stuff himself. Whether he deserves to be up there with other historical scientists and mathematicians who have been on Bank of England notes (like Newton, Darwin, Faraday, and Watt) is an interesting question, but he is undoubtedly a historical figure who deserves commemoration in some way, more so than most of his colleagues at Bletchley Park.