FLASHCARDS: The Alan Turing Story: Cracking Codes, Facing Injustice

Episode Overview:

In this episode of Math, Science, History, host Gabrielle Birchak explores the extraordinary life and legacy of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician, codebreaker, and father of artificial intelligence. From cracking the German Enigma code in World War II to laying the theoretical foundations for modern computing, Turing’s story is one of genius, perseverance, and tragic injustice. This episode examines not only his scientific contributions but also the deeply personal journey of a man whose work continues to shape our world.

  3 Things You'll Learn in This Episode:
- How Alan Turing’s theoretical "Turing Machine" became the foundation of computer science.
- How Turing’s work at Bletchley Park helped end WWII and save millions of lives.
- How his tragic treatment after the war led to a powerful legacy of recognition, apology, and progress in both science and human rights.

Click here to listen to my interview with Daniel Shiu: https://sites.libsyn.com/212183/the-codebreakers-who-reshaped-uk-mathematics-daniel-shiu-on-bletchley-parks-lasting-impact 

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To buy my book Hypatia: The Sum of Her Life on Amazon, visit https://a.co/d/g3OuP9h

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) It's Flashcard Fridays at Math Science History, where
we explore the beautiful, messy, brilliant evolution of
human thought.
I'm Gabrielle Birchak, and today I'm briefly covering
the life of a man whose mind helped
save millions of lives and lay the groundwork
for the digital age we live in.
He cracked codes, he challenged the norms, he

(00:24):
made machines think.
He was the one and only Alan Turing.
I was inspired by his story while researching
the whole story behind Bletchley Park and my
interview with Daniel Shiu, which I hope that
you check out.
Be sure to listen to that interview.
It is absolutely fascinating.
Alan Turing's story isn't just about victory over

(00:46):
Nazi ciphers.
This story is also about math, logic, love,
betrayal, and the incredible power of human imagination.
But first, a quick word from my advertisers.
Grab your tea, or in my case, your
coffee, your slide rule, and your curiosity.
Let's get into it.
Alan Matheson Turing was born on June 23,

(01:09):
1912, in Maida Vale, London.
His father worked in the Indian Civil Service.
So, Alan and his older brothers spent much
of their childhood in England, raised by a
retired army couple.
Turing's early academic performance was a bit uneven.
He showed a deep curiosity for numbers and
patterns, but school demanded classics like Latin and

(01:32):
rote discipline.
Fortunately, math would wait for him.
By the time he was 16, he discovered
the work of Albert Einstein.
He read Einstein's theory of relativity, not only
independently, but understanding it without formal instruction.
It wasn't that he was a genius in
the gifted child sense.

(01:52):
He was a different kind of thinker, someone
who saw the invisible scaffolding behind systems.
In 1931, Turing entered King's College, Cambridge, where
he studied mathematics and developed a close emotional
bond with a fellow student, Christopher Morcom.
Morcom's sudden death devastated Alan Turing, but it
also catalyzed his lifelong pursuit of understanding the

(02:14):
nature of consciousness, mind, and machine.
In 1936, Turing published a paper called Uncomputable
Numbers with an Application to the Anscheidem's Problem.
That's a mouthful, but it's arguably one of
the most important papers of the 20th century.
At its core, the paper tackled a question
posed by mathematician David Hilbert.

(02:36):
Can every mathematical statement be proven true or
false by an algorithm?
Turing's answer, grounded in logic, was no.
And to show that, he invented a thought
experiment now known as the Turing machine.
So what is a Turing machine?
Well, imagine an infinitely long strip of tape.
This tape is divided into cells.

(02:57):
A machine can read, write, and move left
or right on this tape, following a set
of rules.
Despite its simplicity, this theoretical machine could perform
any computation that a modern computer can, given
enough time and tape.
Turing had to find the boundaries of what
could be computed and what could never be.
This is the foundation of computer science, and

(03:18):
he did it before computers even existed.
When World War II broke out in 1939,
Turing joined the top secret government code and
cipher school at Bletchley Park.
It was there that he would help defeat
Nazi Germany, not with bullets or bombs, but
with logic and machines.
The Germans were using an encryption device called
the Enigma machine.

(03:39):
Its settings changed daily, making it nearly impossible
to crack without knowing the initial configuration.
The number of possible configurations?
About 150 quintillion.
Enter Turing.
Building on work by Polish cryptographers, he developed
an electromechanical machine called the BOMB, spelled B

(03:59):
-O-M-B-E.
The BOMB could rapidly eliminate incorrect settings and
identify the correct ones by searching for logical
inconsistencies in intercepted messages.
It was, in essence, the first modern decryption
computer.
By 1942, thanks to Turing's machines and ideas,
the British could routinely read German naval communications.

(04:23):
Historians estimate that Turing's work shortened the war
by two years, saving an estimated 14 million
lives.
Let that sink in.
If you know the history of Turing, and
then you realize that he saved that many
lives, just let that sink in.
After the war, Turing turned his attention back

(04:44):
to computing.
The war had given him the chance to
work with real machines, and now he wanted
to build one from scratch.
At the University of Manchester, he began designing
one of the earliest stored-program computers, the
Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE.
He also wrote the first programming manual.
But more importantly, he returned to a question

(05:05):
that had haunted him since Morcom's death.
Can machines think?
In 1950, he published Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence,
which introduced the Turing Test.
The idea was simple.
If a machine can carry on a conversation
indistinguishably from a human, then it could be
said to be intelligent.
The question, whether machines can truly think, still

(05:27):
fuels debates in AI today.
Turing was decades ahead of his time, not
just in hardware, but in the philosophy of
cautiousness, language, and learning.
But the world Turing helped save wasn't kind
to him.
In 1952, he was arrested for gross indecency
because he was gay, a crime in Britain

(05:48):
at the time.
Faced with prison, he accepted chemical castration through
hormone therapy.
His security clearance was revoked.
He could no longer consult for the government.
He was isolated, humiliated, and watched by British
intelligence.
Two years later, in 1954, Alan Turing was

(06:09):
found dead.
He had bitten into an apple laced with
cyanide.
Some suggest it was suicide.
Others argue it could have been accidental.
Regardless, he died way too young.
He died at the age of 41.
The coroner ruled it a suicide.
But the greater tragedy is how the state
treated one of its greatest minds.

(06:32):
But I'm not going to end there.
In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued
a formal apology way too late.
In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a
posthumous royal pardon.
And in 2009, the Bank of England announced
that Alan Turing would be the face of
the £50 note, a symbol not just of

(06:55):
national pride, but of recognition long overdue.
Turing's name is now everywhere in awards, foundations,
algorithms, theories.
The Turing Award is the Nobel Prize of
Computing.
Tech companies, universities, and even TV shows and
films have honored this amazing man.
But his legacy isn't just about what he

(07:16):
did.
It's how he thought.
He asked, what does it mean to compute?
He asked, what does it mean to think?
He asked, can a machine feel, perceive, learn?
These are the same questions that drive artificial
intelligence research today.
Alan Turing was a man of paradoxes.
He loved abstraction, yet sought real world solutions.

(07:40):
He helped win a war, yet lost his
freedom to the very country he served.
He was logical, almost obsessively so, but also
deeply emotional.
His first love was lost to death.
His last years were shadowed by secrecy and
shame.
Yet, in between, he changed the world.
He envisioned a future where machines would not

(08:01):
only calculate, but learn, speak, imagine a future
that's now unfolding before us.
So next time you ask Siri a question,
use an algorithm to find a recipe or
encrypt your mail, remember, Alan Turing was there
first, quietly, brilliantly, invisibly.

(08:22):
Turing's story reminds us that great minds often
live on the margins.
That genius can be punished by the systems
it serves.
But it also reminds us of something hopeful,
something deeply mathematical, scientific, and human.
That from logic, can create life and even
save lives.

(08:43):
From patterns, we can find meaning.
And from pain, sometimes we can change the
world.
Thank you for joining me on this journey
through the life and legacy of Alan Turing.
If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure
to subscribe, share it with somebody who loves
science history, and check out the show notes
for more resources, references, and bonus content, as

(09:06):
well as a link to my interview with
Daniel Hsu.
Thank you for joining me at Math, Science,
History, and until next time, carpe diem.