Alan turing gay

‘A very camp environment’: why Alan Turing fatefully told police he was gay

For decades, it has puzzled historians. Why, in the course of reporting a burglary to the police in , did the maths genius Alan Turing volunteer that he was in an illegal homosexual relationship? The admission enabled the police to prosecute the Bletchley Park codebreaker for “gross indecency”, conclusion Turing’s groundbreaking perform for GCHQ on early computers and artificial intelligence and compelling him to undergo a chemical castration that rendered him impotent. Two years later, he killed himself.

Now, investigate by a University of Cambridge academic has shed illumination on the reasons why Turing, a former undergraduate and lecturer at King’s College, Cambridge, did not hide his homosexuality from the police. “There was a whole collective in King’s quite different from stories one knows about from gay history, usually involving casual pickups and a lot of despair, hiding and misery,” said Simon Goldhill, professor of classics at the college.

His research has uncovered a “rather happy” community in the formerly

Learn more about the father of modern computer science and gay icon

Brought to you by Solvay's Queer Employee Resource Group, in celebration of Pride Month. Born in London in , Alan Turing’s father was still active in the Indian Civil Service (ICS)* during his childhood years, and because of this, the young child’s parents constantly traveled between the United Kingdom and India, leaving their two sons to stay with a retired Army couple.

Turing was a brilliant mathematician who studied at both Cambridge - where he was awarded first-class honors in mathematics - and Princeton universities. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier.

Before the Second World War he was already active for the British Government’s Code and Cypher College, but in he took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park - where secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies.

It is estimated that the intelligence produced at Bletchley Park shortened the war by

Alan Turing Biography: Computer Pioneer, Homosexual Icon

Alan Turing was a British scientist and a pioneer in computer science. During World War II, he developed a machine that helped break the German Enigma code. He also laid the groundwork for modern computing and theorized about artificial intelligence.

An openly gay man during a time when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain, Turing dedicated suicide after begin convicted of "gross indecency" and sentenced to a procedure some call "chemical castration." He has since turn into a martyred hero of the gay community. In late , nearly 60 years after his death, Queen Elizabeth II formally pardoned him.

Related: History of computers: A brief timeline

Early life

Born on June 23, , Turing was part of an upper-middle-class British family involved in colonial India. Science was a passion for young Turing, who often took part in primitive chemistry experiments. Before applying to schools, Turing was already theorizing on relativity and quantum mechanics.

While attending King's College, Cambridge, Turing focused on his st

10 Things You Need To Know About Alan Turing and His Fascinating Legacy

History

Alan Turing was born in London on June 23, Turing was an English mathematician, cryptographer, and logician whose ground-breaking work led to the Allies winning World War 2. The pivotal moment in Turing&#;s career was personally cracking the Nazi Enigma Code used by the German U-boats preying on the North Atlantic merchant convoys. It was a life-giving contribution, as the decrypted information enabled convoys from North America to evade German U-boats loaded with missiles, allowing them to deliver essential supplies to Allied forces in Europe.

A few years after the end of the war in , Turing took his own life at the young age of 41, shortly after creature outed as gay. At the time of his death, homosexuality was still against the law in England. But more than six decades after Turing&#;s death, he remains a fascination. Turing&#;s life has been featured in operas, plays, novels, musical albums, and films. One of the most well-known pieces about Turing was in the recent film featuring Benedict Cumberbatch