New £50 note celebrates 'war hero and father of computer science' Alan Turing
Alan Turing, the mathematician who helped invent modern computing and break the Enigma code, will be the face of the new £50 note, the Bank of England announced today.
Turing, who is considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, playing a huge role in switching the advantage to the Allies in the battle for the Atlantic.
He was a pioneer of modern computing and proposed an experiment known as the ‘Turing Test’ to discover if a machine could seem human.
However, in March 1953, Turing was convicted of gross indecency for his relationship with a man and was banned from consulting with GCHQ because homosexuals were ineligible for security clearance.
Turing, who had agreed to chemical castration as part of his sentence, committed suicide the following year but did not receive a pardon until 2009.
In 2017, the ‘Alan Turing Law’, was passed that posthumously pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.
Making the announcement at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, said: “Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today.
“As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far ranging and path breaking. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand.
“Turing also leaves a very different, though no less important, legacy. In the UK today, we are fortunate to live in more inclusive times.
“Thanks to groups like the Sexual Law Reform Society and Stonewall, and initiatives like Pride, there has been huge progress towards ending the unfair treatment of people on the basis of sexual orientation and creating a society in which everyone can be their true selves without fear or favour.”
In 2018, the Banknote Character Advisory Committee chose to celebrate the field of science on the £50 note and this was followed by a six-week public nomination period.
The Bank received a total of 227,299 nominations, covering 989 eligible characters. The Committee considered all the nominations before deciding on a shortlist of 12 options, which were put to Carney for him to make the final decision.
The new polymer £50 note is expected to enter circulation by the end of 2021. It uses a portrait of Alan Turing painted in 1951 by Elliott & Fry, which is currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
It also contains a table diagram and instruction sequence from Alan Turing’s 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, which laid the foundations for modern computing.
The note also includes technical drawings of the British Bombe cryptographic machine which was built to help crack the Enigma code.
Turing was born in West London on 23 June 1912 and gained a first class degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University in 1934 before becoming a fellow of Kings College in 1935.
In 1936, aged 24, Turing described his first computing device now referred to as a ‘Turing Machine’, imagining a machine which could read instructions stored in its memory to carry out any computable task.
At the outbreak of WWII, Turing moved to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park where he designed the British Bombe cryptographic machine.
Turing’s team played a pivotal role in cracking the German Enigma code, previously seen as unbreakable. They decoded naval and U-boat messages, which revealed information about German positions in The Atlantic.
Turing was awarded an OBE for his code breaking work. After the war, he worked on designs for pioneering early computers including the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first electronic stored-programme computers which was built in 1950 at the National Physical Laboratory in London.
At Manchester University’s Computing Laboratory, he developed programming for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, the world’s first commercially available electronic computer.
The shortlisted characters, or pairs of characters, considered were Mary Anning, Paul Dirac, Rosalind Franklin, William Herschel and Caroline Herschel, Dorothy Hodgkin, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Stephen Hawking, James Clerk Maxwell, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Sanger and Turing.
Sarah John, Chief Cashier, said: “The strength of the shortlist is testament to the UK’s incredible scientific contribution.
“The breadth of individuals and achievements reflects the huge range of nominations we received for this note and I would to thank the public for all their suggestions of scientists we could celebrate.”
