Honoring Alan Turing
June 7th marks the 58th anniversary of Alan Turing’s tragic suicide. His life was short, but his legacy lives on. Here are some quotes about Alan Turing from people we interviewed for CODEBREAKER:
“The things that he contributed to computer science weren’t the things that just happened to be true in one particular year or one particular decade, they were the things that are fundamentally true so they are always going to be with us in the same way as things that Galileo and Newton contributed to physics are always going to be with us.” — Dr. Alma Whitten – Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering at Google
- “We lost one of our great computer scientists, one of our great mathematicians, and I think British science would have advanced faster and would have been different in many ways, more creative in some ways, if Turing had lived.” — Emeritus Professor Ian Stewart, University of Warwick
- “Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, the greatest scientists in history. To me though, he (Turing) is number one, he’s on the top. There’s no question in my mind.” — Professor Kevin Warwick, University of Reading
- “I think all we can say is that it is a terrible tragedy that such a great and brilliant man should have had to suffer so much. And that his life should have ended in such a tragic way.” — Professor David Leavitt, Author of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”