Alan Turing, Who Cracked Nazi Code, stripped of rank, convicted for being gay

[m-lekktor]

24. excellent film. another good one about him

is a PBS masterpiece theater type show from the 90's called " Breaking the Code". this one is different enough from Imitation Game to make it worth watching without being redundant. Imitation Game seemed to focus more on his personality type, ie possible asbergers, than his gayness which, if i remember, was focussed on more in Breaking the Code. In Breaking the Code they also showed him after he commited suicide by biting into an apple filled with cynanide. which they found him clutching when they discovered his corpse. In Imitation Game his death wasn't covered just mentioned that it occured at the end of the movie before the credits rolled

info for Breaking the Code : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/

an interesting New Yorker piece from 2011:

Alan Turing's Apple The New Yorker

<snip>
Many of the stories you can tell about Alan Turing—the mathematician who did so much for the Allies during the Second World War, and was so betrayed by his country afterward—are like folk tales crossed with science-fiction novels. (He broke German naval codes in an office, in Bletchley Park, called Hut 8, which sounds like a place a robot witch would live.) And some are just parables about gratitude. Last week, Google sponsored a garden party near London (the city before the riots), in Bletchley Park, to raise money to restore some of their proto-computing equipment. That is about as apt an act of corporate philanthropy as one can get; what is Google’s business but breaking the codes in Internet traffic, seeing the patterns, and guessing where we want to go next? It’s like connecting a torpedo to a U-Boat in the middle of an ocean, which, very simplified, is what Turing did. The company also helped what is now the Bletchley Park Trust get some of his papers back. (“I think a lot of our staff feel that if they had been around during the war they would have wanted to work at Bletchley Park,” a Google spokesman told the Telegraph.)

At Bletchley Park, Turing helped figure out how to build a machine that could make sense of codes generated by Enigma, the Germans’ intractable encryption device. He also came up with theories about how computers might work. And he devised the Turing Test: if a person, after watching a number of conversations (via text on a screen) between a computer and a person, couldn’t tell which was which, then the computer could be said to be thinking. What could betray it as a machine—a lack of kindness? It is humane to think so. But one might work Turing’s experience into the equation.

In 1952, Turing was arrested for homosexual activities. (Gays and lesbians have always served their countries in wars, after all.) Given the choice between jail and a severe course of hormone treatment (known as chemical castration), he took the latter, though not for long; he killed himself two years later. He was only forty-two: he had been just twenty-seven when the war began, in 1939. About a year before that, Disney’s “Snow White” had opened in theatres, and Turing had talked about how taken he was by it. That’s not so unusual, and maybe no one would have remembered the detail. But Turing was found with an apple in his hand, one that he had filled with cyanide himself and then bitten. (By coincidence, there are three new Snow White movies in the works; one doubts any will play the poisoned-apple scene as uncannily.)

<snip>

the rest of the article:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/alan-turings-apple