The Enigma of Alan Turing
I blogged earlier here on initial impressions of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. Here I complete my review.
Divvying out credit for the invention of anything that subsequently propagated and morphed as much as the computer is clearly difficult. Time magazine phrased it well: "So many ideas and technological advances converged to create the modern computer that it is foolhardy to give one person the credit for inventing it. But 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."
Yet according to Leavitt, Alan Turing (along with other homosexuals) was written out of the history books for a time due to a lifestyle considered socially unacceptable. Turing’s record was vindicated somewhat by this
Time magazine article when he was named one of the top 20 scientists and thinkers of the 20th century, including "twenty people who overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time."
Leavitt's biography regales readers with back story, including idiosyncrasies and horror stories associated not only with Turing, but some of his contemporaries. For instance, according to Leavitt, not only did Alan Turing fixate on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, choosing to end his life with a poisoned apple, but the Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel also became "inordinately fond" of the film. Gödel became convinced that strangers were trying to poison him, so he refused to eat, and died of starvation. Turing is portrayed as literal-minded and unkempt (keeping his pants up with string tied around his waist) with undiagnosed psychological problems (he counted each revolution of his bicycle wheel and exhibited paranoid behavior).
The story of Alan Turing would be incomplete without some detail of his work and the social and academic climate in which he operated. To that end, Leavitt goes into rather lengthy discussion of World War II cryptography, including Turing's memorable work to develop methods for decrypting The Enigma, used by the Germans. This leads to rather disjointed reading, where biography suddenly morphs into detailed discussions of "computable numbers," interspersed with colorful debate (which is rather fascinating to read in retrospect) over whether computers will be able to think and thereby overthrow humanity. Leavitt adds intrigue by implying that others (John von Neumann?) "appropriated" some of Turing's ideas along the way.
While Leavitt's rendition of Alan Turing's life is nothing if not *interesting*, it is definitely told through the lens of homosexuality. I was reminded of high school AP English, when I had written so many papers about Biblical allegory in Thomas Hardy novels that I began to think every plot and character in literature could be unraveled similarly. Leavitt seems to make a point of "outing" as many famous figures as possible. For example, if he refers to the 1951 film The Man in the White Suit once, he does so a dozen or more times, drawing a parallel between Turing and the character Sidney Stratton (played by Alec Guinness) who creates a fabric that will never wear out. Of course I admit to being naïve, but I was surprised by Leavitt's description of Alec Guiness as "gay," considering the English actor known for the Star Wars role, Obi-Wan Kenobi, was married for 62 years. (I hesitated to even include this personal confusion, as it may be widely known, or may simply be untrue. Interestingly, Leavitt also describes Turing as "naïve, absent-minded, and oblivious to the forces that threatened him," so perhaps I am in good company.)
I recognize that Turing must have been particularly traumatized by the hormone treatments he was subjected to and the physical changes that ensued, as well as enduring a social climate of intolerance. Yet, I was left with the sense that Leavitt cast Alan Turing as a homosexual who worked as a mathematician, rather than a mathematician who was homosexual. And maybe Leavitt's depiction is fair...I don't know...but now I am interested to read another account of Alan Turing's life as a point of comparison. It is astounding to consider how recent the events of Alan Turing's life were and how dramatically the world has been changed by the technology he helped to forge.
Great post, thanks, Donna
I wrote a letter to the editor of COMPUTERWORLD in 1972, asking why Turing got no credit: I didn't realize that his reputation as a "homosexual" had obscured his achievement.
It is hard to imagine just how feared homosexuality was in the 1950s. Basically, my father, who as an upper-middle class physician, both refused to wear Harry Trumanesque goomba shirts and forced my Mom to wear high heels, gloves, a hat, and a dress every day of her life, because, I think, he feared being outed as gay, which he wasn't.
He spoke to me recently of how my Mom looked up to him as a real guy, who'd served in the Army, but unlike the guys who grabbed her when she and her fellow nurses served in the USO. My Mom liked the fact that my father knew opera and would take her on dates to museums, a cheap date in the 1940s.
To me my father represented a solution to the equation of being a guy and being half-civilized.
But because my father couldn't talk about these issues, and because I inherited my Mom's willowy frame, my father was always scared that I was queer. This created alienation and bad feeling that lasts until today, because I felt people shouldn't be labeled. Plus I am not gay, just happy now and then :-).
There was a fashion in the 1970s for outing famous figures. I feel we're all a little bit bisexual, and that creative, intelligent people a little bit more.
Certainly, I encountered anti-gay sexual politics in MIS. The very idea of the geek codes the geek as the feminine/queer term in a relationship to the "real" MANager.
Simple software quality and reliability is re-presented, in the politics, as "frills" with the implication that the software designer not concerned, like a real Man, with the essentials of "business" alone wears mesh bikini shorts underneath his sober Gap attire.
The very idea of the Turing machine is gay-subversive, for it deconstructs the phallic competition of the "powerful" system, which systematically confuses information with the conversion of energy that occurs in that quintessentially male device, the car, with the textual, writerly, and therefore suspect activity of code.