On the 100th anniversary of gay mathematician Alan Turing, there was an interesting back and forth in the blog comments over the weekend.
Hue-Man asks:
And my question: Is it too much of an exaggeration to suggest that without Turing, we’d be working our slide rules… in German?
Kalil responds:
To answer your question:
It’s not an exaggeration at all.
If a sole individual can be credited with winning the war, it’s Alan Turing, for giving us complete intelligence on the entirety of German force distribution and movements. When we went in on D-Day, we practically knew the location of every individual soldier, due to the top-down, radio-dependent nature of the german operations.
And if a sole individual can be credited with beginning the information age, again, it’s Alan Turing.And yet… Where are the monuments? Did you hear about him in your history classes?
Why not?
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