Legacy of Alan Turing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alan Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English[1] mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. He left an extensive legacy in mathematics, science, society and popular culture.
Posthumous tributes
Turing was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire 1946.[2] He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1951.[3] Several things are named in his honour:
Various institutions have paid tribute to Turing by naming things after him including:
- The laboratory in Sherborne School, where he was schooled, is named The Alan Turing Laboratory. [5]
- The computer room at King's College, Cambridge, Turing's alma mater, is called the Turing Room.[6]
- The Turing Room at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics houses a bust of Turing by Eduardo Paolozzi, and a set (No. 42/50) of his Turing prints (2000).[7]
- The University of Surrey has a statue of Turing on their main piazza[4] and one of the buildings of Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences is named after him.[8]
- Istanbul Bilgi University organises an annual conference on the theory of computation called "Turing Days".[9]
- The University of Texas at Austin has an honours computer science programme named the Turing Scholars.[10]
- In the early 1960s, Stanford University named the sole lecture room of the Polya Hall Mathematics building "Alan Turing Auditorium".[11]
- One of the amphitheatres of the Computer Science department (LIFL[12]) at the University of Lille in northern France is named in honour of Alan M. Turing (the other amphitheatre is named after Kurt Gödel).
- The University of Washington has a computer laboratory named after Turing.[13]
- Oxford Brookes University has a building named after Turing.[14]
- Alan Turing Road in the Surrey Research Park[8] and the Alan Turing Way, part of the Manchester inner ring road. Alan Turing road in Loughborough[15] are named after Turing.
- Carnegie Mellon University has a granite bench, situated in the Hornbostel Mall, with the name "A.M. Turing" carved across the top, "Read" down the left leg, and "Write" down the other.[16]
- The University of Oregon has a bust of Turing on the side of Deschutes Hall, the computer science building.[17]
- The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has a road and a square named after Turing (Chemin Alan Turing and Place Alan Turing).[18]
- The Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia, has a lecture room named "Turing Auditorium".[19]
- The Paris Diderot University has a lecture room named "Amphithéâtre Turing".[20]
- The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Würzburg has a lecture hall named "Turing Hörsaal".[21]
- The Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse has a lecture room named "Amphithéâtre Turing" (Bâtiment U4).[22]
- The largest conference hall at the Amsterdam Science Park is named Turingzaal.[23]
- King's College London's School of Natural and Mathematical Sciences awards the Alan Turing Centenary Prize.[24]
- The University of Kent named the Turing College after him at their Canterbury campus.[25]
- The campus of the École polytechnique has a building named after Turing; it is a research centre whose premises are shared by the École Polytechnique, the INRIA and Microsoft.[26]
- The University of Toronto developed the Turing programming language in 1982, named after Turing.
- The campus of State University of Campinas in Brazil has an avenue, one of its largest, named after Turing.[27]
- Ghent University named a computer room after Turing, in their department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.[28]
- Nvidia unveiled their line of GeForce Graphics Cards based on the Turing microarchitecture, which in turn was named after Turing. The architecture introduces the first consumer products capable of real-time raytracing, which has been a longstanding goal of the computer graphics industry.
- Turing House School in London[29] and one of the 'houses' at Wellacre Academy in Manchester are named after him.[30]
- Redmond, Washington, the location of Microsoft Corporation's headquarters, named a street adjacent to the Microsoft main Campus after Turing, along with streets named for other historically significant scientists and inventors.[31]
- The University of Wolverhampton has a tribunal "Alan Turing" building in honour of the code breaker.
A biography published by the Royal Society shortly after Turing's death,[3] while his wartime work was still subject to the Official Secrets Act, recorded:
Three remarkable papers written just before the war, on three diverse mathematical subjects, show the quality of the work that might have been produced if he had settled down to work on some big problem at that critical time. For his work at the Foreign Office he was awarded the OBE.[3]
Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery for technical or theoretical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's highest honour, equivalent to the Nobel Prize.[32]
On 23 June 1998, on what would have been Turing's 86th birthday, his biographer, Andrew Hodges, unveiled an official English Heritage blue plaque at his birthplace in Warrington Crescent, London, later the Colonnade Hotel.[33][34] To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, a memorial plaque was unveiled on 7 June 2004 at his former residence, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow, Cheshire.[35]
On 13 March 2000, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines issued a set of postage stamps to celebrate the greatest achievements of the 20th century, one of which carries a portrait of Turing against a background of repeated 0s and 1s and is captioned: "1937: Alan Turing's theory of digital computing". On 1 April 2003, Turing's work at Bletchley Park was named an IEEE Milestone.[36] On 28 October 2004, a bronze statue of Turing sculpted by John W. Mills was unveiled at the University of Surrey in Guildford, marking the 50th anniversary of Turing's death; it portrays him carrying his books across the campus.[4]
Turing was one of four mathematicians examined in the BBC documentary entitled Dangerous Knowledge (2008).[37] The Princeton Alumni Weekly named Turing the second most significant alumnus in the history of Princeton University, second only to President James Madison. A 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Turing was unveiled on 19 June 2007 at Bletchley Park. Built from approximately half a million pieces of Welsh slate, it was sculpted by Stephen Kettle, having been commissioned by the American billionaire Sidney Frank.[38]
Turing has been honoured in various ways in Manchester, the city where he worked towards the end of his life. In 1994, a stretch of the A6010 road (the Manchester city intermediate ring road) was named "Alan Turing Way". A bridge carrying this road was widened and carries the name Alan Turing Bridge A statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester on 23 June 2001 in Sackville Park, between the University of Manchester building on Whitworth Street and Canal Street. The memorial statue depicts the "father of computer science" sitting on a bench at a central position in the park, holding an apple. The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text "Alan Mathison Turing 1912–1954" and "IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ". The latter is described as "a motto as encoded by the German 'Enigma'".[39] A plaque at the statue's feet reads "Father of Computer Science, Mathematician, Logician, Wartime Codebreaker, Victim of Prejudice", followed by a Bertrand Russell quotation: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture."
In 1999, Time magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and stated, "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."[40]
In 2002, Turing was ranked twenty-first on the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.[41] In 2006, British writer and mathematician Ioan James chose Turing as one of twenty people to feature in his book about famous historical figures who may have had some of the traits of Asperger syndrome.[42] In 2010, actor/playwright Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Turing in the solo musical, Icons: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 4. In 2011, in The Guardian's "My hero" series, writer Alan Garner chose Turing as his hero and described how they had met while out jogging in the early 1950s. Garner remembered Turing as "funny and witty" and said that he "talked endlessly".[43] In 2006, Turing was named with online resources as an LGBT History Month Icon.[44] In 2006, Boston Pride named Turing their Honorary Grand Marshal.[45]
The logo of Apple Inc. is often erroneously referred to as a tribute to Turing, with the bite mark a reference to his death.[46] Both the designer of the logo[47] and the company deny that there is any homage to Turing in the design.[48][49] Stephen Fry has recounted asking Steve Jobs whether the design was intentional, saying that Jobs' response was, "God, we wish it were."[50] In February 2011, Turing's papers from the Second World War were bought for the nation with an 11th-hour bid by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, allowing them to stay at Bletchley Park.[51]
In 2012, Turing was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.[52][53]
The song "Alan et la Pomme", by francophone singer-songwriter Salvatore Adamo, is a tribute to Turing.[54][better source needed] Turing's life and work featured in a BBC children's programme about famous scientists, Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom, first broadcast on 12 March 2014.
On 17 May 2014, the world's first work of public art to recognise Turing as gay was commissioned in Bletchley, close by to Bletchley Park where his war-time work was carried out. The commission was announced to mark International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. The work was unveiled at a ceremony on Turing's birthday, 23 June 2014, and is placed alongside busy Watling Street, the old main road to London, where Turing himself would have passed by on many occasions. On 22 October 2014, Turing was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor.[55][56]
In 2014, Turing was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields."[57][58][59]
In February 2019, in the BBC eight-part TV series Icons: The Greatest Person of the 20th Century, Turing was voted by viewers to be the Greatest Person.[60]
In July 2019, the Bank of England announced that Turing's portrait would appear on the next edition of the Bank of England £50 note, to be released in 2021.[61][62] He is the first openly gay person to appear on a banknote.[63]
In 2021, Turing's former residence, Hollymeade, on Adlington Road, Wilmslow, was offered for sale by estate agent Savills,[64] having previously been sold in 2013.[65]
On 17 June 2025, a collection of Turing’s academic papers, including his PhD dissertation, was sold at auction for £465,400 after being discovered in a loft.[66]
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