The latest move in the canonisation of Alan Turing is an opera, or whatever, written by the Pet Shop Boys, which is being heavily promoted by a PR campaign launched yesterday. As part of this press onslaught this magazine cover appeared on my Twitter stream today.
For the record, as a fan and one time student of meta-mathematics I was aware of and to some extent in awe of Alan Turing long before most of the people now trying to elevate him into Olympus even knew he existed. He was without a shadow of a doubt one of the most brilliant logicians of the twentieth-century and he along with others of his ilk, such as Leopold Löwenheim, Thoralf Skolem, Emil Post, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church etc. etc., who laid the theoretical foundations for much of the computer age, all deserve to be much better known than they are, however the attempts to adulate Turing’s memory have become grotesque. The Gay Man Who Saved the World is hyperbolic, hagiographic bullshit!
Turing made significant contributions to the work of Bletchley Park in breaking various German codes during the Second World War. He was one of nine thousand people who worked there. He did not work in isolation; he led a team that cracked one version of the Enigma Code. To what extent the work of Bletchley Park contributed to the eventual Allied victory is probably almost impossible to assess or quantify.
Alan Turing made significant contributions to the theories of meta-mathematics and an equally significant contribution to the British war effort. He did not, as is frequently claimed by the claqueur, invent the computer and he most certainly did not “save the world”. Can we please return to sanity in our assessment of our scientific heroes?
