Who was Alan Turing?
The following is an excerpt from ‘Click, Tap, or Touch to Open’, a chapter in Turing, by B. Jack Copeland
Three words to sum up Alan Turing? Humour: he had an impish, irreverent, and infectious sense of humour. Courage: both intellectual and physical. He would need courage when put on trial for being gay. Isolation: he loved to work alone. Reading his scientific papers, it is almost as though the rest of the world — the busy community of human minds working away on the same or related problems — simply did not exist. Turing was determined to do it his way.
Three more words? Patriotic. Unconventional: he was uncompromisingly unconventional, and he didn’t much care what other people thought about his unusual methods. Genius. Turing’s brilliant mind was sparsely furnished, though. He was a Spartan in all things, inner and outer, and had no time for pleasing decor, soft furnishings, superfluous embellishment, or unnecessary words. To him what mattered was the truth. Everything else was mere froth. He succeeded where a better furnished, wordier, more ornate mind might have failed. Alan Turing changed the world. What would it have been like to meet him? Turing was tallish (5 feet 10 inches) and broadly built. He looked strong and fi t. You might have mistaken his age, as he always seemed younger than he was. He was good looking but strange. If you came across him at a party, you would certainly notice him. In fact, you might ask, ‘Who on earth is that?’ It wasn’t just his shabby clothes or dirty fingernails. It was the whole package. Part of it was the unusual noise he made. This has often been described as a stammer, but it wasn’t. It was his way of preventing people from interrupting him, while he thought out what he was trying to say. ‘Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . .Ah . . . Ah.’ He did it loudly.
If you crossed the room to talk to him, you would have probably found him gauche and rather reserved. He was decidedly lah-di-dah, but the reserve wasn’t standoffishness. He was shy, a man of few words. Polite small talk did not come easily to him. He might — if you were lucky — smile engagingly, his blue eyes twinkling, and come out with something quirky that would make you laugh. If conversation developed, you’d probably find him vivid and funny. He might ask you, in his rather high-pitched voice, whether you think a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream or could make you fall in love with it. Or he might ask if you can say why a face is reversed left to right in a mirror but not top to bottom.
Once you got to know him, Turing was fun — cheerful, lively, stimulating, comic, brimming with boyish enthusiasm. His raucous crow-like laugh pealed out boisterously. But he was also a loner. ‘Turing was always by himself,’ said code breaker Jerry Roberts. ‘He didn’t seem to talk to people a lot, although with his own circle he was sociable enough.’ Like everyone else, Turing craved affection and company but he never seemed to quite fit in anywhere. He was bothered by his own social strangeness — although, like his hair, it was a force of nature he could do little about.
Occasionally he could be very rude. If he thought that someone wasn’t listening to him with sufficient attention, he would simply walk away. Turing was the sort of man who, usually unintentionally, ruffled people’s feathers — especially pompous people, people in authority, and scientific poseurs. He was moody too. His assistant at the National Physical Laboratory, Jim Wilkinson, recalled with amusement that there were days when it was best just to keep out of Turing’s way. Beneath the cranky, craggy, irreverent exterior there was an unworldly innocence, though, as well as sensitivity and modesty.
Jack Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he is Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. His books include The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press), Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press), Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine (Oxford University Press), Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior (Oxford University Press), and Artificial Intelligence (Blackwell). He has published more than 100 articles on the philosophy and history of computing, and mathematical and philosophical logic.
Image: Alan Turing statue, by Duane Wessels. CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
