Alan Turing Honored As The Face of the UK's New 50-Pound Bank Note (npr.org) 67
The Bank of England has unveiled the new 50-pound note featuring mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, who helped the Allies win World War II with his code-breaking prowess but died an outcast after facing government persecution over his homosexuality. NPR reports: The bank revealed the note's design and features -- which include a number of clever visual references to Turing's work -- on Thursday, nearly two years after first announcing that it would honor Turing. The banknote will officially enter circulation on June 23, Turing's birthday. Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, noted in prepared remarks that Turing is arguably best known for his code-breaking work, which historians credit with shortening World War II by about two years and saving millions of lives. But far beyond that, he said, Turing's pioneering work in computing and artificial intelligence "has had an enormous impact on how we all live today."
Instead of paper, the new note is made from polymer, which is longer-lasting and harder to counterfeit. It completes the bank's "family" of polymer banknotes, Bailey said, joining the Winston Churchill 5-pound, Jane Austen 10-pound and J.M.W. Turner 20-pound. The note itself features an image of Turing and his signature as it appeared in a 1947 visitor's sign-in book on display at Bletchley Park Trust, where he worked during the war. It includes a quotation, taken from a 1949 interview in which Turing was speaking about his ground-breaking Pilot ACE machine, one of the world's first computers: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be."
Symbolic designs on the note include a mathematical table and formulae from Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem," technical drawings of the British Bombe code-breaking machine and ticker tape depicting his birth date in binary code. A sunflower-shaped foil patch, containing the initials "AT, "represents Turing's work in morphogenetics, a branch of developmental biology focused on the algorithms behind patterns occurring in nature. It's another scientific field for which Turing helped lay the groundwork, Bailey noted.
Instead of paper, the new note is made from polymer, which is longer-lasting and harder to counterfeit. It completes the bank's "family" of polymer banknotes, Bailey said, joining the Winston Churchill 5-pound, Jane Austen 10-pound and J.M.W. Turner 20-pound. The note itself features an image of Turing and his signature as it appeared in a 1947 visitor's sign-in book on display at Bletchley Park Trust, where he worked during the war. It includes a quotation, taken from a 1949 interview in which Turing was speaking about his ground-breaking Pilot ACE machine, one of the world's first computers: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be."
Symbolic designs on the note include a mathematical table and formulae from Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem," technical drawings of the British Bombe code-breaking machine and ticker tape depicting his birth date in binary code. A sunflower-shaped foil patch, containing the initials "AT, "represents Turing's work in morphogenetics, a branch of developmental biology focused on the algorithms behind patterns occurring in nature. It's another scientific field for which Turing helped lay the groundwork, Bailey noted.
Inspiring design (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Inspiring design (Score:5, Insightful)
There's the whole 20th century of colored notes and different sizes to make life easier for the blind that the US would have to skip first.
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Ah, but you can, in the American south and Cali... as long as you understand the conversion rate.
It's the 1421.66 peso note.
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Well we're getting Martin Luther King, Jr. on the back of the $5 bill and Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20.
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Well we're getting Martin Luther King, Jr. on the back of the $5 bill and Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20.
It's actually the face, so the front of the bill?
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Why does the face have be the front? Are you facially prejudiced?
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What ever side the face is on is the face of the bill. Obviously. 8^)
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So how does that work for the new £50 note, because there is a face on both sides?
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Well that is obvious as well. It is a two faced bank note so I wouldn't trust it if I were you. 8^)
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It would be nice, but lets be honest. This is the US of A, and he was not only a gay nerd, but also *English*
We're nowhere close to being in a place that such a proposal would stand a snowball's chance in hell.
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It would be nice, but lets be honest. This is the US of A, and he was not only a gay nerd, but also *English*
We're nowhere close to being in a place that such a proposal would stand a snowball's chance in hell.
I thought in the US of A "English" was synonymous with Gay?
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Many would call me "anti-gay" because I have traditional (and defensible and sustainable) views regarding sexuality.
But put Mr. Turing on the darn bill anyway.
A person is not his or her sexuality, and Mr. Turing obviously helped to define many of the very foundations of modern society and culture.
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Many would call me "anti-gay" because I have traditional (and defensible and sustainable) views regarding sexuality
I imagine that sticking your nose into other people's bedrooms *could* be called "traditional", but I fail to see how such intrusion could pass for "defensible" or "sustainable".
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Depends on what country you're in I guess, for instance, is it illegal in Tunisia to make copies of Korean money? It would make sense for counterfeiting laws to include all currencies but law doesn't always get it right.
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Some friends and I got into trouble - as in, escorted by plain-clothes officers to the police station for a "talking to" - for producing tickets for a club disco by black-and-white photocopying £1 notes - after modifying the artwork slightly. (At that time, quid notes were various shades of green with small amounts of black and blue, as I recall ; even a severely colour blind people couldn't have been f
Re: Honest design? (Score:3)
Honor the man who helped win the war and pioneer the information age or honor the broken shell of a man babbling about whether a machine could truly be said to think if it could not enjoy strawberries and cream the way a human could?
Staying positive was probably the better move.
Fame is relative (Score:3)
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Yes, he was convicted and inhumanely punished which led to his suicide.
This despite the fact that he was a genius whose work changed the world and a war hero whose work saved it.
His accomplishments outshined his fame then, and continue to outshine the fame of most famous people ever since.
Re:Fame is relative (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. In computer science circles he's up there with Babbage as basically the two fathers of modern digital computing. But while Babbage's differential machine was an unrealized curiosity (due to the limits of machining capabilities in the 19th century), Turing's contributions to modern computing are direct and discernible. Oh, and that he's as responsible for beating Germany as just about anyone can be said to be, he gets that extraordinary honor. And that his genius and contributions were insufficient for the British courts to do anything but treat him in a horrifying and undignified manner is a dark stain on Britain. They treated one of their heroes, and one of the great minds of the 20th century, like some depraved monster.
Re:Fame is relative (Score:5, Informative)
Turing's work was so secret that when he was prosecuted and convicted, he was just an academic as far as the public and press were concerned. Very few people would have known of his contribution and wouldn't dared have spoken publicly about it. Many of the workers at Bletchley Park went to their graves and never talked of anything they did.
His work and the whole decoding effort at Bletchley Park only became public knowledge in the late 70s and early 80s. The Government classified it as very high security material because the work done in WW2 continued against the Soviet Union and other countries.
Yes he saw shamefully treated and the law in those days was unjust but he wasn't a public hero then.
Turing's work was not secret (Score:2, Informative)
The landmark work on computation and the Turing machine and programs that could not be written was all published in 1930s. That is how I first learned about Turing.
He was also one of several geniuses that worked on Enigma, but he was not the most important.
The reason that he is on the note is because he was gay. How times have changed, in this case probably for the better.
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Such as ?
Yes, there were other genius-grade people in the project for certain. Rejewski, RÃżycki and Zygalski were quite likely on a par with Turing, but being Polish are unlikely to appear on a British banknote. Even though they designed and built the first bomby for breaking Enigma in the late 1930s. While Tommy Flowers [wikipedia.org] - who designed and built the Colossus - was a working class engineer, and so a
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Turing's work was so secret that when he was prosecuted and convicted, he was just an academic as far as the public and press were concerned.
Yes, and if Britain's government had any common decency at the time, the old boy network would have been invoked and the prosecutor taken aside and told very firmly to leave him alone. He didn't have to know why. He just had to be told. And it's very reasonable to demand such. Britain's government is famous for its old boy network. That's what boarding schools do for you. It's amazing how cohesive a youth cohort gets with all that shared trauma...
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Not quite as simple as that. Then the Police ran the prosecutions and any attempt from on high to stop it would have been more likely to backfire with a journalist tipped off in a pub. The only way to stop a newspaper publishing material is a "D-Notice [wikipedia.org]' which is only used for matters of National Security and sparingly as it's a semi-voluntary code. Do not underestimate the power of the press in the UK who even then were no fans of the Establishment.
When he was in court he asked for one additional offence to
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It's not as simple as that. Significant changes to the plans were happening all the time with Babbage's efforts. Whether the machinists of the time could have built parts to the necessary precision, because Babbage was always fiddling with the design. Whether having a "release to manufacture" would have got Babbage to commit to a "feature freeze" is a moot point - those resea
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To assuage the guilt of those that did the persecuting. What did it do for a dead Alan Turning, NOTHING. I got an opinion on posthumous awards, SHOVE THEM UP YOUR FUCKING COLLECTIVE ARSES.
Do something right when they are alive, after they are dead, to assuage guilt, what a waste of fucking time, as far as that person is concerned.
The country and government that shat all over the dude in life, is now trying to claim greatness from their victim.
Re: Fame is relative (Score:1)
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We can't change what our forbears did. Those who did the persecuting are long dead as is the victim.
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The government is a collection of people. And that collection has changed in the same way as times, opinions and law have.
Recognising the work of Turing, a gay man, now will help those alive today who continue to experience unfair treatment due to sexual orientation.
It is accepted that Turing's treatment was unfair and unjust by today's standards but there is nothing that can be done other than honour and remember him.
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The "suicide" story is disputed. The police ruled it suicide at the time because of the presence of cyanide. But Turing had been experimenting with electroplating in his room using potassium cyanide. Given that he was a mathematician - not a chemist - it's likely he accidentally poisoned himself by inhaling cyanide vapours from his own experiments.
At best we can say the suicide story is possible but unproven. And I
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Hmmm, That sounds ... dubious. You'd need to get on the order of 0.2g of hydrogen cyanide into the lungs. 0.0074 moles. About 0.2 litres of neat cyanide gas (at NTP) that needs to be generated, then get into the lungs. That's quite a lot. Even a fairly incompetent chemist will see that amount of bubbling. And the smell is apparently quite strong, too. I routinely use out-of-date calibration ampoules of highly toxic hyd
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Unless the Filth murdered him - which is always an option on the table when the Filth are involved.
Need a roll of 50's (Score:5, Funny)
Now I just need an infinitely long roll of 50 pound notes that a machine can mark and read ...
OK, but can we actually use them? (Score:2)
Almost nowhere accepts £50 notes, as I discovered when returning to the UK from Finland, hoping to carry a little bulky cash as possible. Not even many banks...
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I had similar issues with large (100?) Euro notes when I visited the Netherlands. It was a surprise coming from Australia, where I've never seen this happen. Hopefully they become more common with the increased anti-counterfeiting measures.
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Well, it's going to go both ways.
In Australia, you don't see it because of polymer notes that make it virtually impossible to counterfeit - it's why every polymer note has a clear window in it, and a hologram because it's possible to make those during production. There's
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Noting the new 50 pound note is the last of the Bank of Englands notes to go polymer and hence the design change. Noting the current design is James Watt and Mathew Bolton.
Thing is they are hardly ever used, I think I have seen just a handful of 50 pound notes in the last 30 years.
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Yes, due to paranoia about counterfeit notes...
But because of this, there are virtually no counterfeit 50 notes. The counterfeiters are not stupid, and will print the lower value notes which they know are more likely to be accepted.
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...which sort of makes them next to useless, no?
Well, let's hope these new ones will help bring them back into circulation and make them useful again.
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Builders and bookies* use £50 notes
* betting shops
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I had a taxi driver try to refuse a Scottish £20 in Englandshire. So I replaced it
Good news indeed (Score:2)
Save your negatives for another day
That's Not Turing! (Score:5, Funny)
Who is this imposter?
Tommy Flowers? (Score:3)
When are the contributions of Tommy Flowers going to get the recognition they deserve?
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Never. There should be a statue to Tommy in Trafalgar Square. I think he has a community centre named after him and a pop-up pub.
Unfortunately he wasn't the right chap, from the right university [gay or not] and wasn't an academic so has been to some extent forgotten.
It's reflective to the still-current disdain among the British Establishment for anyone who works in "trade" or builds something. He was the son of a brick-layer after all...
Ironically his name and legacy lives on strongly in the one medium tha
The "Turing" should have been the virtual currency (Score:4)
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That's a good point.
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JMW Turner (Score:1)
Who the hell is JMW Turner? Why is he on the £20 note?
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Of course I looked him up. I had actually barely heard of him before ..I preferred it when he owned CNN .. anyway it's just that there are like a whole list of people they should have put instead:
Here's a ranking of Brits who would have been higher ranked:
1. Isaac Newton
2. Lord Nelson
3. Isambard Brunel
4. Winston Churchill
5. Shakespeare
etc...
39724. JMW Turner
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4 was on some English note, I'm sure. Don't see many of them at this end of the country.
3. Son of a French asylum seeker? You jest, surely?
2 & 5, I'm not sure about. Maybe English ones?
convenient (Score:1)
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What a load of old bollocks. Churchill was effusive in his praise for the work done at Bletchley.
The establishment had no idea Turing was prosecuted for "gross indecency" until it was all over.