How many of you have heard of a man named Alan Turing? Probably very few, I know I hadnt until I viewed an episode of the History of Museums on the History Channel the other day. I thought of this little known man, who was a genius in his field. He was the main guy who helped to solve the problem of the German advance in Word War II. During that war the Uboats were a smashing success delivering crippling blows to our supply ships to Britain. Our supply ships were helping to stave off the blockade that the Germans were seeking to use to starve the British people into submission. The British were the only power in the way of complete European domination.
Due in large part to the enigma machine, a machine that wirlessly sent coded messages to the Uboats, the Germans were abled to send secure messages,and were ahead of the rest of the world. The United States scrambled to find a way to decode them and keep up.They found human decoding much too slow to keep up in real time. They set about to devise a machine to switch back and forth between decoding algebraic equations, and sending messages to our warships to intercept the Uboats. Obviously this was a huge undertaking. They hired Alan Turing a Cambridge an Harvard graduate in mathmatics, to oversee the project. In 1945 during the height of the war, he devised a formula and machine to decode the messages.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
His heroic and brilliant work helped turn the tide of the war that the Germans would most certainly had won if we hadnt become involved. Now here is a perfect example of a guy born to humble roots, and yet distinquishes himself. Many people can name Douglas Macarthur, Rommel, Eisenhower, but who has heard of Alan Turing?
Unfortunately he didnt live out his years or live up to his potential. He was the center of a scandal in his home country, because of homosexuality. He died from an apple laced with cyanide poisoning.. a mightly intellect slain by a simple act of deception. As I reflected on this story, I realized that many people who are much smarter than the people we constantly see in the public eye will never be known. Some people prefer being behind the scenes, still others are ruined by it. Turing was the foreunner of the modern computer, because many of the principles of computational theory that run modern day computers, were first devised by him.
One can only wonder what he might had achieved with funding and govt support had he not died young? Many of the inventions that run this world are created by people we will never meet or even hear of.. Be content in obscurity and do not seek fame:seek only to find your brilliance and use it for practical purposes in this world.
Turing also came up with idea of artificial intelligence or AI. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
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