This is a petition to get Alan Turing depicted on the new £10 note designs: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31659
There's also a facebook page, if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.facebook.com/TuringOnTheTenner
Some of you will no doubt know why he is such an important figure but for those that don't I shall explain a little.
Alan Turing was a leading codebreaker in WW2 and played a crucial role in deciphering the Enigma cipher, some actually go as far as saying he was a key factor in winning the war.
He was also pretty much the founding father of computer science as it is, with his most famous paper being on Computational Intelligence and the Turing Test, which is a test designed to tell if a computer can pass for human.
He fascinatingly managed to write a computer program for a computer that didn't exist (no computers powerful enough to run such a program existed at the time) to play chess, he played out the program himself, making moves using mathematical logic taking half an hour per move against one of his colleagues.
He also made some pretty amazing discoveries in the field of Biology (some of which apply to Mathematics too), in which he researched the appearance of the Fibonacci sequence in plants.
He has many other papers on mostly mathematics I think and obviously he was a very intelligent man, I don't think he gets enough recognition for the work he did considering the massive, and still ongoing, effect it had on the world.
This next bit isn't necessarily relevant, but still a key part of his history I feel.
He was also prosecuted for homosexuality by the British Government in 1952, he accepted chemical castration as punishment and he was not the same after. He killed himself in 1954 attributed to the stress brought on by the changes the castration brought about in him.
Gordon Brown apologised publicly for this in 2009.
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Originally Posted by 3agle
So fair points.
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