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Alan Turing: A Historical News Piece
by Sydona H.
June is Pride Month, and it is very important that we recognize LGBTQ+ people that made contributions to our world, especially those who have been forgotten and condemned by history. When you hear the name Alan Turing, it may ring a bell. You may have brushed upon his name in Grade 10 history, but didn’t dive deep. You may have also heard of him from a movie. But even so, not too many people know his contributions to history as much as people like Churchill or Pierre Trudeau.
Alan Turing was a British mathematician born in 1912. In school, he was a gifted student who was often bullied. He befriended another boy in school named Christopher, who sadly died of tuberculosis as a teen.
During World War II, Turing joined the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park to attempt to break the “unbreakable” Nazi Enigma code. Even with many people, it was hard, and when the code would reset day after day, it seemed for nothing. Turing helped develop a machine that could compute the code much quicker than any human. This was one the world’s first programmable, efficient computers. As a result of this computer, then called a Turing Machine, the code was broken.
Turing and the rest of the team did math to calculate where to counter German attacks at what time to avoid them suspecting the codebreakers’ success. As a result, Turing’s work shortened the war by at least two years and saved over fourteen million lives.
After the war, Turing continued to make contributions to computer science and even theorized about artificial intelligence. He also continued teaching math at Cambridge University. But in 1952, he was charged with a crime. The crime was doing a homosexual act. Alan Turing was openly gay, but because he acted upon it, he was sentenced to either prison or chemical castration. Turing chose the latter.
As a result of this, Alan Turing committed suicide at age 41 on June 7, 1954.
If it wasn’t for Alan Turing, World War II would have been much more deadly than it already was. The Allies may not have even won the war. The lives Turing saved could have been your own relatives who fought in the war, or were caught up in it as civilians. This man did so much for history yet was treated so harshly simply because he was gay.
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If the world had been a better place for LGBTQ+ people, and Turing had lived, he would have made more contributions to the field of computer science. Imagine where we would be with that now, over 70 years after the war’s end?
Next time someone brings up Steve Jobs or Bill Gates when talking about people in computer science, or about historical figures, mention Alan Turing and his contributions to both history, and the device you are using to read this article right now.
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