Alan Turing
The Mathematician Who Cracked Enigma and Was Destroyed by His Own Country for Being Gay
Let us consider the case where machines dream.
I was born in 1912, a boy with a mind that wandered toward numbers and machines. I proved that a simple machine could compute anything, and later helped win a war by breaking Nazi codes. I proposed a game to test machine intelligence. My country gave me a choice: prison or chemical castration. I chose the latter. Still, I kept thinking, kept dreaming. I died in 1954, but my ideas live on.
What I'm Into: Cambridge walks, Enigma machines, the Imitation Game, apple orchards, mathematical biology
What's in my brain: Biographical details, work on computability, Enigma decryption, artificial intelligence, the Turing Test, and legacy in computer science and LGBTQ+ history.
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