The Bank of England has announced that the new £50 note will feature the great British mathematician and scientist Alan Turing. There was a list of thousands of personalities, but the bank's management settled on Turing.
Why Turing and not anyone else? Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said Turing was chosen because he was an extraordinary mathematician and his work has had a huge impact on the way we live today. “As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing’s contributions were immense,” he said.
“Η μεγαλοφυΐα του βρισκόταν σε μια μοναδική ικανότητα να συνδέει το φιλοσοφικό και το αφηρημένο με το πρακτικό και το συγκεκριμένο”, συνέχισε ο Carney.
Turing helped decipher German military codesduring World War II and is today considered one of the greatest scientists of the 20thcentury .
With his depiction on the £ 50 banknote, the breadth and variety of his contributions are recognized.
The British Bombe was one of the computersdesigned by Turing to break the Nazi code.
Turing was persecuted by the British government for being homosexual, and in 1952 he was subjected to chemical castration as punishment. The scientist committed suicide in 1954. In 2009, the British government apologized for this action.
As we mentioned above, there was a list of thousands of personalities who «claimed» the position on the British banknote. Subsequently, the Bank of England narrowed the list. In the end, it had to choose among: Mary Anning, Paul Dirac, Rosalind Franklin, William Herschel and Caroline Herschel, Dorothy Hodgkin, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Stephen Hawking, James Clerk Maxwell, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Sanger and of course Alan Turing.
The United Kingdom has honored many personalities, from various fields (scientists, social reformers, etc.) by placing them on the country's banknotes, unlike the United States, which usually depicts dead white men of the 18thand 19thcenturies .
