Intuition and ingenuity: Alan Turing’s work and impact

Legend has it that Apple’s rainbow-coloured logo showing the apple with a bite out of it is in homage to Alan Turing “the father of modern computing”. Turing died of cyanide poisoning on 7 June 1954, two years after being convicted of homosexuality and accepting chemical castration instead of prison. A half-eaten apple was found next to him, and one theory is that he’d laced it with cyanide, his own homage to the wicked queen in Snow White, his favourite Disney cartoon. Another theory is that he died accidentally after inhaling cyanide fumes from apparatus he had in his bedroom for electroplating spoons. A third explanation is that he really did commit suicide, but set up the apparatus so his mother would think it was an accident. The coroner didn’t test the apple for cyanide, so we’ll never know for sure.
If there are doubts about Turing’s death, his life is fairly well-known, or at least some aspects of it. His most noteworthy exploit for the general public was helping to break the code of the Enigma machines the Germans used to communicate with their submarines during the Second World War. If you’d like to get some idea of how he did it, take a look at the excerpts from the “Enigma Paper” in Alan Turing, His Work and Impact, just published by Elsevier. Cryptography is the second of four parts of this thousand-page overview presenting Turing’s most significant works from the four-volume Collected Works along with comment, analysis and anecdote from leading scholars. The other three parts are on Turing’s contributions to computability, artificial intelligence, and biology. Read more...