On the morning of June 8, 1954, Alan Turing's housekeeper arrived at his home in Wilmslow, England, and found him dead in his bed. He was forty-one years old. On his bedside table was a half-eaten apple. The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide by cyanide poisoning, and the conclusion was accepted with a speed that some who knew him found troubling. Turing had been subjected two years earlier to a course of chemical castration, ordered by a court after his conviction for gross indecency following his relationship with a young man. He had received the treatment with a public composure that those closest to him found difficult to read, and had continued working, corresponding, and planning future research with what appeared to be characteristic intellectual energy in the months that followed. Whether the apple was deliberately poisoned, whether his death was accident or intention, has never been definitively established. What is certain is that Britain had treated one of the most consequential minds of the twentieth century as a criminal for the fact of his sexuality, and that the man who had helped shorten the Second World War and laid the theoretical foundations of the computer age died alone, in circumstances that his country preferred not to examine too closely. A formal apology from the British government came in 2009. A royal pardon followed in 2013. Turing had been dead for nearly sixty years.
Alan Turing (1912–1954) was an English mathematician, logician, pioneer of computer science, and wartime codebreaker whose contributions to the modern world are so fundamental that they have become invisible, absorbed into the technology and the intellectual frameworks that shape daily life in ways most people never think to question. He is credited with creating the design for the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the earliest electronic stored-program computers, and with the Bombe, the decryption device that enabled British intelligence to crack the German Enigma machine and read the enemy's most sensitive communications throughout the Second World War. Historians estimate that his work at Bletchley Park shortened the war by 2 years and saved millions of lives. He also asked, with characteristic directness, whether machines could think, and the question he posed in 1950 has never been more urgently relevant than it is today.
To explore the full breadth of that legacy requires a scholar who has spent decades inside the archive and in conversation with those who knew Turing personally. Jack Copeland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, is the world's foremost authority on Turing's life and work. His biography, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, draws on years of conversations with Turing's closest friends and colleagues, and his other books, including The Essential Turing, Artificial Intelligence, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, and Alan Turing's Electronic Brain, have established him as the definitive guide to the man and his ideas.
In the conversation that follows, Copeland explores the complex character of a shy genius whose intellectual courage was matched only by the injustice of his treatment, reflecting on a life that changed the world and was cut short before it had finished doing so.
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