The Deification of Alan Turing

How an obscure British mathematician became a tool for establishing computer science as a legitimate discipline.

Computers have always been of interest to mathematicians. They originated as calculating machines, after all. But the early days of computers were governed more by pragmatic engineering approaches that drew from a variety of disciplines — including linguistics, cognitive science, and industrial design — rather than mathematical theory. It was only later, when the young Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) needed to establish computer science as a legitimate field of study that the history got edited to suggest a smooth evolution from theoretical mathematics to computing. To sell that message ACM needed founding figures and they settled on a deceased British mathematician named Alan Turing.

Today that choice seems obvious: Turing machines! The Turing test! The cracking of Enigma! Who better to be elevated as a founding father of computer science?

Except most of those aspects of Turing’s life were not known or were not significant at the time ACM members began promoting Turing’s status. Turing’s code breaking work, in particular, was not revealed until the 70ties, and the full collection of documents have still not been declassified to this day. And while Turing’s work on Turing machines did serve as the theoretical basis for…