FLASHCARDS: The Alan Turing Story: Cracking Codes, Facing Injustice

Gabrielle Birchak/ May 23, 2025/ Late Modern History, Modern History/ 0 comments

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS

It’s Flash­card Fri­days at Math! Sci­ence! His­to­ry!, where we explore the beau­ti­ful, messy, bril­liant evo­lu­tion of human thought. I’m Gabrielle Bir­chak, and today I’m briefly cov­er­ing the life of a man whose mind helped save mil­lions of lives and lay the ground­work for the dig­i­tal age we live in. He cracked codes, he chal­lenged the norms, he made machines think.

He was the one and only Alan Tur­ing. I was inspired by his sto­ry while research­ing the whole sto­ry behind Bletch­ley Park and my inter­view with Daniel Shiu, which I hope that you check out. Be sure to lis­ten to that interview.

It is absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Alan Tur­ing’s sto­ry isn’t just about vic­to­ry over Nazi ciphers. This sto­ry is also about math, log­ic, love, betray­al, and the incred­i­ble pow­er of human imagination.

Grab your tea, or in my case, cof­fee, your slide rule, and your curios­i­ty. Let’s get into it.

Alan Math­e­son Tur­ing was born on June 23, 1912, in Mai­da Vale, Lon­don. His father worked in the Indi­an Civ­il Ser­vice. So, Alan and his old­er broth­ers spent much of their child­hood in Eng­land, raised by a retired army couple.

Tur­ing’s ear­ly aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance was a bit uneven. He showed a deep curios­i­ty for num­bers and pat­terns, but school demand­ed clas­sics like Latin and rote dis­ci­pline. For­tu­nate­ly, math would wait for him.

By the time he was 16, he dis­cov­ered the work of Albert Ein­stein. He read Ein­stein’s the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, not only inde­pen­dent­ly, but under­stand­ing it with­out for­mal instruc­tion. It was­n’t that he was a genius in the gift­ed child sense.

He was a dif­fer­ent kind of thinker, some­one who saw the invis­i­ble scaf­fold­ing behind sys­tems. In 1931, Tur­ing entered King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, where he stud­ied math­e­mat­ics and devel­oped a close emo­tion­al bond with a fel­low stu­dent, Christo­pher Mor­com. Mor­com’s sud­den death dev­as­tat­ed Alan Tur­ing, but it also cat­alyzed his life­long pur­suit of under­stand­ing the nature of con­scious­ness, mind, and machine.

In 1936, Tur­ing pub­lished a paper called Uncom­putable Num­bers with an Appli­ca­tion to the Anschei­dem’s Prob­lem. That’s a mouth­ful, but it’s arguably one of the most impor­tant papers of the 20th cen­tu­ry. At its core, the paper tack­led a ques­tion posed by math­e­mati­cian David Hilbert.

Can every math­e­mat­i­cal state­ment be proven true or false by an algo­rithm? Tur­ing’s answer, ground­ed in log­ic, was no. And to show that, he invent­ed a thought exper­i­ment now known as the Tur­ing machine. So what is a Tur­ing machine? Well, imag­ine an infi­nite­ly long strip of tape.

This tape is divid­ed into cells. A machine can read, write, and move left or right on this tape, fol­low­ing a set of rules. Despite its sim­plic­i­ty, this the­o­ret­i­cal machine could per­form any com­pu­ta­tion that a mod­ern com­put­er can, giv­en enough time and tape.

Tur­ing had to find the bound­aries of what could be com­put­ed and what could nev­er be. This is the foun­da­tion of com­put­er sci­ence, and he did it before com­put­ers even exist­ed. When World War II broke out in 1939, Tur­ing joined the top secret gov­ern­ment code and cipher school at Bletch­ley Park.

It was there that he would help defeat Nazi Ger­many, not with bul­lets or bombs, but with log­ic and machines. The Ger­mans were using an encryp­tion device called the Enig­ma machine. Its set­tings changed dai­ly, mak­ing it near­ly impos­si­ble to crack with­out know­ing the ini­tial configuration.

The num­ber of pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions? About 150 quin­til­lion. Enter Tur­ing. Build­ing on work by Pol­ish cryp­tog­ra­phers, he devel­oped an electro­mechan­i­cal machine called the BOMB, spelled B‑O-M-B‑E.

The BOMB could rapid­ly elim­i­nate incor­rect set­tings and iden­ti­fy the cor­rect ones by search­ing for log­i­cal incon­sis­ten­cies in inter­cept­ed mes­sages. It was, in essence, the first mod­ern decryp­tion com­put­er. By 1942, thanks to Tur­ing’s machines and ideas, the British could rou­tine­ly read Ger­man naval communications.

His­to­ri­ans esti­mate that Tur­ing’s work short­ened the war by two years, sav­ing an esti­mat­ed 14 mil­lion lives. Let that sink in. If you know the his­to­ry of Tur­ing, and then you real­ize that he saved that many lives, just let that sink in.

After the war, Tur­ing turned his atten­tion back to com­put­ing. The war had giv­en him the chance to work with real machines, and now he want­ed to build one from scratch. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­ches­ter, he began design­ing one of the ear­li­est stored-pro­gram com­put­ers, the Auto­mat­ic Com­put­ing Engine, or ACE.

He also wrote the first pro­gram­ming man­u­al. But more impor­tant­ly, he returned to a ques­tion that had haunt­ed him since Mor­com’s death. Can machines think? In 1950, he pub­lished Com­put­ing, Machin­ery, and Intel­li­gence, which intro­duced the Tur­ing Test.

The idea was sim­ple. If a machine can car­ry on a con­ver­sa­tion indis­tin­guish­ably from a human, then it could be said to be intel­li­gent. The ques­tion, whether machines can tru­ly think, still fuels debates in AI today.

Tur­ing was decades ahead of his time, not just in hard­ware, but in the phi­los­o­phy of cau­tious­ness, lan­guage, and learn­ing. But the world Tur­ing helped save was­n’t kind to him. In 1952, he was arrest­ed for gross inde­cen­cy because he was gay, a crime in Britain at the time.

Faced with prison, he accept­ed chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion through hor­mone ther­a­py. His secu­ri­ty clear­ance was revoked. He could no longer con­sult for the government.

He was iso­lat­ed, humil­i­at­ed, and watched by British intel­li­gence. Two years lat­er, in 1954, Alan Tur­ing was found dead. He had bit­ten into an apple laced with cyanide.

Some sug­gest it was sui­cide. Oth­ers argue it could have been acci­den­tal. Regard­less, he died way too young.

He died at the age of 41. The coro­ner ruled it a sui­cide. But the greater tragedy is how the state treat­ed one of its great­est minds.

But I’m not going to end there. In 2009, British Prime Min­is­ter Gor­don Brown issued a for­mal apol­o­gy way too late. In 2013, Queen Eliz­a­beth II grant­ed him a posthu­mous roy­al pardon.

And in 2009, the Bank of Eng­land announced that Alan Tur­ing would be the face of the £50 note, a sym­bol not just of nation­al pride, but of recog­ni­tion long over­due. Tur­ing’s name is now every­where in awards, foun­da­tions, algo­rithms, the­o­ries. The Tur­ing Award is the Nobel Prize of Computing.

Tech com­pa­nies, uni­ver­si­ties, and even TV shows and films have hon­ored this amaz­ing man. But his lega­cy isn’t just about what he did. It’s how he thought.

He asked, what does it mean to com­pute? He asked, what does it mean to think? He asked, can a machine feel, per­ceive, learn? These are the same ques­tions that dri­ve arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence research today. Alan Tur­ing was a man of para­dox­es. He loved abstrac­tion, yet sought real world solutions.

He helped win a war, yet lost his free­dom to the very coun­try he served. He was log­i­cal, almost obses­sive­ly so, but also deeply emo­tion­al. His first love was lost to death.

His last years were shad­owed by secre­cy and shame. Yet, in between, he changed the world. He envi­sioned a future where machines would not only cal­cu­late, but learn, speak, imag­ine a future that’s now unfold­ing before us.

So next time you ask Siri a ques­tion, use an algo­rithm to find a recipe or encrypt your mail, remem­ber, Alan Tur­ing was there first, qui­et­ly, bril­liant­ly, invis­i­bly. Tur­ing’s sto­ry reminds us that great minds often live on the mar­gins. That genius can be pun­ished by the sys­tems it serves.

But it also reminds us of some­thing hope­ful, some­thing deeply math­e­mat­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, and human. That from log­ic, can cre­ate life and even save lives. From pat­terns, we can find meaning.

And from pain, some­times we can change the world. Thank you for join­ing me on this jour­ney through the life and lega­cy of Alan Tur­ing. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to sub­scribe, share it with some­body who loves sci­ence his­to­ry, and check out the show notes for more resources, ref­er­ences, and bonus con­tent, as well as a link to my inter­view with Daniel Shiu.

Thank you for join­ing me at Math! Sci­ence! His­to­ry! and until next time, carpe diem.

SHOW NOTES

In this episode of Math, Sci­ence, His­to­ry, host Gabrielle Bir­chak explores the extra­or­di­nary life and lega­cy of Alan Tur­ing, the bril­liant math­e­mati­cian, code­break­er, and father of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. From crack­ing the Ger­man Enig­ma code in World War II to lay­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal foun­da­tions for mod­ern com­put­ing, Turing’s sto­ry is one of genius, per­se­ver­ance, and trag­ic injus­tice. This episode exam­ines not only his sci­en­tif­ic con­tri­bu­tions but also the deeply per­son­al jour­ney of a man whose work con­tin­ues to shape our world.

3 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Alan Turing’s the­o­ret­i­cal “Tur­ing Machine” became the foun­da­tion of com­put­er sci­ence.
- How Turing’s work at Bletch­ley Park helped end WWII and save mil­lions of lives.
- How his trag­ic treat­ment after the war led to a pow­er­ful lega­cy of recog­ni­tion, apol­o­gy, and progress in both sci­ence and human rights.

Explore more on our web­site: mathsciencehistory.com
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Resources!

Bletch­ley Park Muse­um: https://bletchleypark.org.uk

The Tur­ing Insti­tute: https://www.turing.ac.uk

Hodges, Andrew. Alan Tur­ing: The Enigma.

Tur­ing, Alan. “Com­put­ing Machin­ery and Intel­li­gence,” Mind, 1950.

Nation­al Muse­um of Com­put­ing: https://www.tnmoc.org

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