The Mind Creative
Turing was honoured in a number of other ways, particularly in the
city of Manchester, where he worked toward the end of his life. In
1999, Time magazine named him one of its "100 Most Important
People of the 20th century," saying, "The fact remains that
everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a
word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing
machine." Turing was also ranked 21st on the BBC nationwide poll
of the "100 Greatest Britons" in 2002. By and large, Turing has
been recognized for his impact on computer science, with many
crediting him as the "founder" of the field.
Following a petition started by
John Graham-Cumming, then
Prime Minister Gordon Brown
released
a
statement
on
September 10, 2009 on behalf
of the British government,
posthumously apologising to
Turing for prosecuting him as a
homosexual.
Tom Siegfried wrote in the
Cosmos magazine that “At the
age of 41, the man who played
the starring role in saving
Western democracy from Hitler
became the victim of a more
disguised form of evil. In his
tragically truncated life, Turing
peered more deeply into reality than most thinkers who had come
before him. He saw the profound link between the symbolisms of
mathematical abstraction and the concrete physical mechanisms
of computations. He saw further how computational mechanisms
could mimic the thought and intelligence previously associated
only with biology. From his insights sprang an industry that
invaded all other industries, and an outlook that today pervades
all of society.”
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