Castrated by a grateful nation

Some people’s lives drive you into a rage. Alan Turing’s is one. In The Man Who Knew Too Much David Leavitt unexpectedly compares him to Alec Guinness playing Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit. Like Stratton, who invented a suit that would never wear out, Turing was a brilliant scientific deviant, interested in ‘welding the theoretical to the practical, approaching mathematics from a perspective that reflected the industrial ethos of the England in which he was raised’. And, like Stratton, he was ‘hounded out of the world’. But Stratton was playing an Ealing comedy. The injustice done to Turing makes you want to spit at someone. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Turing’s favourite film. He was especially fond of a scene in which the Wicked Queen coats an apple in poison to give to Snow White.

Turing’s first great mathematical contribution followed shortly after Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and used similar unseemly mathematical techniques.