A photo of this sculpture hangs in my study

Alan Turing was born on 23rd June 1912. I wasn’t aware that I shared a birthday with one of my heroes until the 1990s, long after his untimely death. In fact, the world knew very little about him until government papers were released in the 1970s under the 30 year rule. And yet he is now going to be memorialised on the next £50 note.

Actually I did become aware of some of his work at University, because I read his seminal pre-War paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” as part of a Philosophy of Maths module. Neither I, nor my tutor, knew that this was to become the foundation for computer science, via his work on the theoretical constructs he called ‘universal machines’ – now referred to as ‘Turing machines’. His work was influenced by all the key figures in the field, Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alonzo Church, David Hilbert and John von Neumann – all of whom I had read.

Later, of course, he was able to convert his imaginary machines into physical reality. After the War he built some of the earliest computers, first at the National Physical Laboratory and then at Manchester University.

Alan Turing wasn’t directly involved in building the Colossus – the world’s first electronic programmable computer – at Bletchley Park, although his theoretical ideas underpinned it. In the early days of the War he had developed another machine called the Bombe which was designed specifically to decrypt messages generated by the German Enigma machines.

We all know the story of how in 1952, long before he had been recognised as a national treasure, he was convicted on charges of gross indecency, having admitted as much to the police when they were investigating a burglary. To avoid going to prison he opted to take synthetic oestrogen – a form of chemical castration – for a whole year. As a consequence of the conviction he lost his consultancy job at GCHQ, the successor to Bletchley Park.

In 1954 he was found in his bed having died from cyanide poisoning. The inquest verdict was suicide, but that has been questioned since. He was apparently experimenting in a spare room with electroplating gold onto spoons, and was using potassium cyanide to dissolve the gold, so he could easily have inhaled the fumes by accident.

In the 1970s some of the papers that related to the wartime work in Bletchley Park were decommissioned. I remember the excitement around those revelations, and loved reading Andrew Hodges’ biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma”.  I seem to have a first edition, dated 1983, which bears a slightly different title: “The Enigma of Intelligence”, but it is the same text. It manages to combine the story of his life with in depth, but accessible, accounts of his discoveries and inventions.  The book spawned the film “The Imitation Game”, and I also remember going to see the 1986 play “Breaking the Code” starring Derek Jacobi.

In 1988, I started on a Masters in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems at Imperial College, and much of what I had studied in the past in Philosophy and Computing came together in a magical way. Over half of the course was actually on Logic and built on my studies for my first degrees. Indeed the alternative forms of Logic that I had studied, over twenty years before, as entirely theoretical concepts were now revealed to be the key underpinnings of Artificial Intelligence.

I have much to thank Alan Turing for – his ideas have threaded through my life, and his story has been inspirational. And I haven’t even mentioned the Turing Test. We can only speculate on what he could have achieved if he had lived a full working life.

As a footnote, in 2011 the Lib Dem MP John Leech started a petition for Alan Turing to be pardoned. At first this was rejected on the grounds that Turing was properly convicted under the laws of the time. Leech continued his campaign and in 2013 the Queen signed his pardon. But it didn’t end there, and in 2017 the “Alan Turing Law” was enacted, which extended the pardon to 75,000 men who had been convicted in the past for their homosexuality.

Please note

We have been in full self-isolation since 16th March to protect my husband whose immune system is compromised.

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* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.