Alan Turing
1912 – 1954 · United Kingdom
Known for: Father of computer science; broke Enigma
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
Biography
Before the computer existed, Alan Turing imagined it, a universal machine, described in a 1936 paper, that could compute anything computable. At Bletchley Park he led the team that broke the Nazi Enigma cipher, an achievement historians credit with shortening the Second World War by years and saving millions of lives. It stayed secret for three decades.
Instead of honours, Britain gave him persecution: convicted in 1952 for loving another man, he was chemically castrated and died two years later from cyanide poisoning at 41. The royal pardon came in 2013; his face is now on the £50 note. Every phone, every server, every line of code, including the ones that assembled this page, runs on the idea of that one quiet man.