6,000 sign e-petition to put Turing on £10 note Mathematician, computer scientist and Nazi code-breaking hero Alan Turing could soon join Her Maj on the Bank of England’s new £10 note. Nearly 6,000 people have signed a government e-petition calling for the computer pioneer’s mug to appear on the tenner here. The petition comes in the centenary year of Turing’s birth. …
You could argue Turing saved us from Nazis as well as inventing computer science. The U-boats basically had free reign over the atlantic before their encryption was broken. Darwin's insights remained purely theoretical until long after his death, whereas Turing helped win a war and started technology that's fundamentally transformed our lives.
There were two photos of IKB in front of those chains (which was during the launch of the Great Eastern). The first was an "official" one with him posing self-consciously, and the photographer realised that it was no good. IKB relaxed with his cigar while the photographer was changing plates and then the photographer took the second without warning him.
The second picture was vastly better and is the one we always see today.
Scott was a a brave and courageous man, but I would personally rank several people ahead of him, even in his own field.
Ernest Shackleton, Frank Wild and Lawrence Oates to name but three.
"I am just going outside and may be some time" - Lawrence Oates, 16 Mar 1912
"For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time."
- Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Antarctic Explorer and member of Scott's Terra Nova Expedition).
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If Robert Hooke hasn't yet featured on a banknote, he should be at or near the front of the queue.
Isaac Newton was a towering scientific genius but a fairly frightful man. He did all he could to bury Hooke's accomplishments, and took the credit for several things that Hooke should rightfully have been credited with.
Newton was also master of the Royal Mint, which is why is woud be such a good thing to honour Hooke with a place on a banknote!
Hawking isn't dead, and the tradition is that this rules him out. People are honoured with memorials after they are no longer alive.
Faraday invented Davy's safety lamp for miners, according to the biography by James Hamilton. Priestley, as you say, stuck to the wrong theory of phlogiston after Lavoisier had discovered Oxygen and explained combustion. There are plenty of other British scientific superstars, though, and it's about time they were properly honoured, like the French do.
"There are plenty of other British scientific superstars, though, and it's about time they were properly honoured, like the French do."
I had no idea that the French had a tradition of honouring British scientific superstars. If that's the case I'll take back what I may have said about the French in the past.
is a TV serial:
I implore you all to google ' Essex Terror The Alan Turing Adventures' and look at the first link:
[Starring Mark Gatiss] The Alan Turing Adventures is set during an alternate history Second World War. Turing here has been re-imagined as a dashing and flamboyant secret agent careering around behind enemy lines in a desperate attempt to steal and decode Hitler’s childhood diary, en route to which he gets locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun (Benedict Cumberbatch)
Can we get petition Mark Gatiss to actually make this?
Okay, my above post was a link to some beautiful nutter's spoof. It entertained me!
Has got to better than the film 'Enigma'.
But seriously, I was fascinated to learn of some of Turing's work after WW2. That on the self organisation of cells in embryos. Turing found the principal that explained how, out of a small ball of seemingly identical cells, some would become form your head, some your toes. i.e, global effects out of local communication. Or something. Devilishly clever, though. Definitely a big contribution to Darwin's field.
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