British mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing (1912-1954) broke the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, playing a crucial role in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.
Yet, for all his genius and contribution to the war effort, the life of this soft-spoken visionary was marred by trauma and tragedy. Despondent after the inhumane treatment inflicted on him by the British government—which tried to “cure” his homosexuality through chemical castration—he committed suicide at the age of 41.
But now a newly signed legislation will pardon tens of thousands of gay men like Turing, who were convicted of sexual offenses in the UK since the end of the 19th century. Dubbed “Turing Law,” the legislation “is probably the best way of acknowledging the real harm done by the unjust and cruel homophobic laws, which thankfully we’ve now repealed,” British politician, Lord Sharkey, told the BBC.
Homosexuality was finally decriminalized in the UK in 1967—more than a decade after Turing’s death—but for nearly a century it had had a catastrophic effect on the lives of gay and bisexual men, including the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde.
Turing made significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and modern computer science, long before these fields existed. He devised the so-called “Turing Test,” a process of testing a machine’s ability to “think,” a revolutionary concept he outlined in his 1950 paper, “Computing machinery and intelligence.”
After he had been convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952, Turing opted for chemical castration instead of imprisonment, so that he could continue his pioneering work. However, the physical and mental effects of the hormonal treatment made it difficult for Turing to focus. As one of his biographers, David Leavitt, noted, the punishment sent the mathematician on a “slow, sad descent into grief and madness,” and, ultimately, an untimely death.
In 2009, the British government issued a public apology for the “appalling” treatment of Turing, and four years later Queen Elizabeth officially pardoned him.
Well-intentioned as they undoubtedly were, these posthumous actions, along with the new law, cannot bring back the brilliant scientist. His legacy, however, continues to live on.
As The New York Times pointed out, “We live in an algorithmic world that Turing foresaw and in a world that, as it slowly accepts homosexuality, would have been unforeseeable to him.”