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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: 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.