Alan Turing has had a good run in recent decades. The great British mathematician, who died in 1954, was the focus of last year’s acclaimed biopic, The Imitation Game. The film, ostensibly based on Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography Alan Turing, the Enigma, was only the latest in a string of plays, TV dramas and novels that told Turing’s story primarily through the lens of his wartime code-breaking activities at Bletchley Park and his struggles with his homosexuality.
Popular reductions, however, tend to attribute every scientific development in a field to a single individual. When you read, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing saved the Allies from the Nazis,” — to quote from the book-jacket copy and, one supposes, the mission statement of the film — the immediate reaction is to wonder what the Russians, who lost many times more people than the British or Americans during World War II, would say about that. Or the Poles, whose particular contributions to Allied decryption efforts are criminally ignored in the film and frequently overlooked by armchair historians. Without detracting from Turing’s reputation in the slightest, it is nevertheless worth taking a brief look at what he did, and what a few others did, too.
