Friday 22 June 2012

Happy Birthday, Alan Turing

Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful!


Today marks the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, so links-of-the-week are to articles about him. The first, by computer scientist Vint Cerf summarises Turing's acheivements and points out that his should be a house-hold name:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17662585

the second is  a link to "The Alan Turing Year" project's homepage and the articles it contains-
http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/

Looking back, over history, it is easy to find examples of geniuses who suffered personally on account of the climate of the times in which they lived. The persecution and house arrest of Galileo Galilei for heresy is perhaps the most obvious example, but it seems to remiss to write about Alan Turing without noting that he- too- was treated appalingly by the authorities and the state for whom he worked. In a mere 41 years of life and just over 20 years of working-life, Alan Turing laid the foundations for much of modern computing and work into artifical intelligence, so it is hard not to wonder what else he might have devised and how mankind might have benefitted, had he lived in kinder times and lived out his natural life-span.

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