Alan Turing
Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician and computer scientist. After studying at Cambridge and working and acquiring his Ph.D. at Princeton University, he lectured at Manchester University. During this period, Turing began work that would allow the advent of computers. He believed that machines were capable of calculating anything that was quantifiable- the basis of future computer technology. Turing also helped build the ACE computer at the British National Physical Laboratory and develop LU decomposition to help solve matrices.
During the Second World War, Turing was an important part of the Bletchley Park Code breaking team who was in charge of cracking the German enigma code. Turing succeeded, but he and the rest of the team were not credited until many years later as this war work was declared highly confidential. In 1941, he nearly married a colleague at Bletchley, Joan Clarke. But he called the wedding off because he did not believe it would be fair to marry her.
This was because Alan Turing was a homosexual. In 1952, when Turing was 39, a burglary/investigation of his house uncovered his relationship with 19-year-old Arnold Murray. Homosexuality was illegal at the time, and so despite his exemplary wartime service, Turing was convicted of homosexual acts. The court gave Turing a stark choice: prison or hormonal castration. Turing chose castration so he could remain free and continue his work. But as well as destroying his libido and physically altering his body, Turing’s ability to think and concentrate was taken away by the introduction of estrogen.
In a letter to a friend, Turing admitted that he had developed “shocking tendency at present to fritter my time away in anything but what I ought to be doing.” This is a side effect of hormonal castration according to Dr. Allan Pacey, an expert in male fertility at the University of Sheffield. Professor David Leavitt, a Turing biographer, believes this proved to be ” a demoralizing experience and embittering experience for him.” On June 8, 1954, at the age of 41, Turing was found calmly in bed, poisoned by vast quantities of potassium cyanide.