Alan Turing at 100 ⇥ washingtonpost.com

David Leavitt reflects on Alan Turing in a comment piece for the Washington Post:

For Alan Turing’s many admirers, the centenary of his birth on Saturday is an occasion for both celebration and mourning. Here, after all, is the architect of the modern computer, the code-breaker whose ingenuity ensured an Allied victory in World War II and the father of artificial intelligence. Yet Turing was also a victim of a pernicious and paranoid strain of sexual hypocrisy in 20th-century England. Nor, in the 21st, has the victimization wholly ceased.

Today, we remember Turing for what would have been his hundredth birthday. We remember him for his substantial contributions in technology, but we must not forget the circumstances of his last years and death.