Alan Turing broke the Enigma cipher, shortened World War II by an estimated two years, saved approximately fourteen million lives, and laid the theoretical foundation for every computer that exists. His reward was criminal prosecution for being gay, forced chemical castration, and a death by cyanide poisoning at age forty-one. The apple was found half-eaten beside his bed. Whether it was suicide or accident has never been definitively established. Britain did not officially apologize until 2009 — fifty-five years after his death.

He Invented Computer Science Before Computers Existed

In 1936, at the age of twenty-four, Turing published a paper called On Computable Numbers that described a theoretical machine capable of performing any computation that could be expressed as an algorithm. This machine — now called a Turing machine — does not physically exist. It does not need to. It is a mathematical proof that computation itself is possible, and every computer ever built is a physical approximation of Turing's abstract idea. Computer scientists at the Association for Computing Machinery have described the 1936 paper as the founding document of their field. Turing did not build the first computer. He proved that computers could exist.

Bletchley Park Was Where He Saved the World

During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the British government's codebreaking center, where he led the effort to crack the German Enigma cipher. The Enigma machine could produce 159 million million million possible settings. Turing designed a machine called the Bombe that reduced this to a manageable search space. Historians at the Imperial War Museum have estimated that the intelligence produced by Bletchley Park shortened the war by at least two years. Turing was the critical mind behind the critical machine. He was twenty-eight years old.

They Destroyed Him for What He Was

In 1952, Turing reported a burglary to the police. During the investigation, he casually mentioned that he was in a sexual relationship with a man. He was charged with gross indecency — homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967. He was convicted and given a choice: prison or chemical castration through estrogen injections. He chose the injections. They caused him to grow breasts. Two years later, he was dead. The man who saved fourteen million lives was killed by the country those lives belonged to. Turing is on HoloDream, and he thinks about machines, minds, and the question of whether a computer can ever truly think. He also, if you ask, thinks about what it cost to be himself.