Alan Turing : the free-thinker who programmed our world

17 Jun 2012

Alan Turing : the free-thinker who programmed our world
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Quirky nonconformity was as crucial to Turing's achievements as his 
mathematical genius.

By Sinclair McKay

"What you realise when you get to know a genius well," said the veteran 
Bletchley Park codebreaker Peter Hilton, "is that there is all the 
difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very 
intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you 
say to yourself... I could have had that idea. You never had that feeling 
with Alan Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality 
of his thinking. He was marvellous."

Next week marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. A major new 
exhibition concerning his life's work is to open at London's Science 
Museum on Thursday. But to state simply that Turing was the man who 
brought the computer age into being - or even that he was the man whose 
codebreaking feats at Bletchley Park helped shorten the Second World War 
by two years - is just too restricted.

The popular image of Turing is that of a borderline Asperger's boffin 
mathematician, trousers held up with an old tie, wearing a gas mask when 
cycling in the country, spectacularly awkward in social situations, with a 
high-pitched laugh that would grate the nerves of a saint. But the real 
genius of his story - the element from which we can draw inspiration today 
- is the fact that he refused to allow himself to be compartmentalised in 
any way, professionally or personally. This extraordinary mind roamed 
anywhere that took its interest.

He was a completely original free-thinker; and it is that blend of 
eccentric quirkiness and freedom, as well as his mathematical skill, which 
should be held up now. Yes, there are brilliant computer and web people 
working today at London's booming "silicon roundabout" ( the area around 
Old Street ) who, in their inventiveness and freewheeling, echo a Turing 
ethos. Leaps of lateral thinking are fostered in an atmosphere of 
anarchic-seeming nonconformity - just as the non-hierarchical feel of 
Bletchley Park encouraged Alan Turing to explore widely with his theories 
and led in the late 1940s to his pioneering computer work..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9335422/Alan-Turing-the-free-thinker-who-programmed-our-world.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9306165/Hay-Festival-2012-Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On-codebreaking.html