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War hero Alan Turing honoured with stamp

Gay mathematician hero who helped defeat the Nazis gets Royal Mail tribute

gaystarnews.com, 3-1-2012

Alan Turing, the gay war hero who helped defeat the Nazis by cracking their secret Enigma message code, is being honoured on a Royal Mail stamp.

The Queen has personally approved the picture honouring Turing which shows his Bombe code-breaking machine from World War Two.

The first-class stamp tribute, naming him as one of 10 ‘Britons of Distinction’, comes at a time when there is still a campaign running seeking a posthumous pardon for his conviction for homosexuality in 1952.

The stamp will be released in Britain on 23 February from Royal Mail. Today, there are an estimated 2.5 million stamp collectors and gifters in the UK and millions more worldwide.

Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist, whose work with the code-breakers at Bletchley Park helped to speed up the end of the Second World War.

The Cambridge don had invented the Turing machine, a calculator capable of solving any mathematical problem, which was created in his head many years before the technology existed to build the actual computer.

He was one among many eccentrics recruited to join the secret operation at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to break the encrypted messages generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines.

Turing was the head of the Hut 8 team and led the design of the code-breaking Bombe machine.

The round-the-clock work of the code breakers, and the intelligence they deciphered from messages which were fed to Bletchley through a network of intercept stations listening in on German communications, are believed to have shortened the war by up to two years and saved countless lives.

Turing continued innovative research after the war, when he worked for the National Physical Laboratory and at Manchester University. The Turing Test he devised in 1950, to determine whether a computer is capable of thinking like a human, remains the gold standard in developing artificial intelligence.

His later years were shadowed by his homosexuality at a time when it remained a criminal offence. He was arrested in 1952 and avoided prison only by accepting injections of hormones as ‘therapy’. His conviction also lost him his security clearance, so he could no longer work for the government.

He was found dead in 1954, from cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple by his bed. One story, believed by some and labeled an urban myth by others, is that the Apple computers logo – a rainbow-coloured apple with a chunk bitten out – was designed in tribute to Turing.