Alan Turing, mathematician and cryptographer, managed to achieve incredible feats despite being held back by stigma surrounding his sexuality. This scholar loved to take in new information to solve new problems and was an undeniable math genius. Alan Turing made math history through his excellence in mathematics, heroism in World War 2, and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, all while being openly gay in a society where homosexual acts were illegal.
Alan Turing was born on June 23rd, 1912. When he was little, he loved to learn about science and how things worked. However, this love quickly turned into a passion for logic and probability in mathematics. When Turing was nineteen, he experienced a personal crisis when his close friend died of Bovine Tuberculosis. In response, formerly religious Turing renounced his faith and became an atheist. He went off to Kings College at Oxford, and made great strides by proving the Central Limit Theorem in his dissertation at only twenty-two years old. At 24, Turing published “On Computable Numbers”, in which he presented a thought experiment in which a machine could solve algorithms, later coined the “Turing Machine”. From a young age, Turing showed a passion for math and pursued it.
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Turing then moved from pure mathematics into the study of cryptography, which he studied in the United States. After the onset of World War 2, he returned to England where he worked with the Allies to break the German enigma code, one which had been deemed impossible to crack. He worked to develop the Bombe, which would help him solve it. Eventually, he was able to solve it, which allowed the Allies to locate German U boats, saving countless lives. During this time, he also proposed to his coworker, a woman named Joan Clarke. However, he quickly backed out and admitted to being gay.
After the war, Turing started to focus on artificial intelligence. In a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, he sets the standard for machine intelligence, something that is later called the “Turing Test”. In order for a piece of technology to pass the Turing Test for artificial intelligence, a human must be unable to distinguish it from another person during a conversation. This test is still used to this day. Shortly after developing this, he started a sexual relationship with a nineteen year old man named Arnold Murray, inviting him to stay overnight several times. Murray later helped someone to break into Turing’s house. Turing reported the crime, and
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