Why is this in Bootnotes?
And am I the only person that sees Apple's logo as a sick joke at Turing's expense?
The Turing papers - the almost complete collection of the great codebreaker's writings - failed to reach their reserve price at auction today. Bidders at Christie's pushed the price up to £240,000, but that was lower than the minimum price set by the seller. Google had offered $100,000 towards any purchase, and Bletchley Park …
To one poor man's terrible solution to state persecution, intolerance and despair? I've never thought about the rainbow colours before but even that could be seen as a reference to his homesexuality.
I just dug out an interview with the logo designer, in which he denies this (so I guess I'm not the only one, after all). He did, however, describe the method of suicide as 'really cool'.
Do you even know who Alan Turing was?
He cracked the codes the Germans were using in the war to give us much needed information and was imprisoned after the war when they found out he was gay.
Without his help the war would have been much more difficult and yet the British Government locked him up as a thankyou.
If you don't think his worth the money then don't buy it, but we need to keep those papers in the UK, they are hugely important historically.
He wasn't imprisoned - he was bound over for a year on condition that he underwent hormonal treatment. Disgusting and horrible, of course, but he was never locked up.
It's true that he helped crack the German WW2 codes, but that's not why these papers are important. His pre-war work is absolutely fundamental to modern computing, dealing with what can and can't be done with computers.
Even if he'd never worked at Bletchley Park, he would still be one of the most important British thinkers - he was a mathematician so I'm not calling him a scientist - of the 20th century.
What's the difference between an Apple I and an Enigma machine?
One was the product of an egomaniacal sociopath bent on world domination, its inner workings shrouded in obsessive secrecy, and each new model represented a grave threat to civilization.
The other was a fancy typewriter.
Do you know who he was?
The code work he did was important, yes, but of much more relevance to today's world, prior to WW2 he set out to provide definitive theoretical proof of whether or not it was possible to solve any mathematical problem by building a machine to do so.
The answer he came up with was that it wasn't (at least at the time) - but for all problems that could be solved by machine, rather than build a different machine for each problem the work could be done by a single design of machine applying a limited set of basic operations in a specified sequence determined for the particular problem.
The Lyons chain of tearooms in the UK heard about this concept and the rest, as they say, is history.
The reason he was locked up was because he was homosexual - not only was he locked up but he also under went chemical treatments to stop him committing this crime again.
He eventually committed suicide at a comparatively young age by eating an apple that had been dipped in a cyanide solution.
Given the impact Turing's work has had on virtually every person on this planet I'm surprised that the British government hasn't acquired these papers on behalf of the people and put them in a museum before now.
"...surprised that the British government hasn't acquired these papers on behalf of the people..."
But what was realy for sale - it was a collection of the publications of the work, not an original manuscript or a unique item. If one was to go looking, I'd be willing to bet the exact same materials could be found in other collections and at a much reduce price.
Don't get me wrong - the British Government should do more to honour Turing. I'm just suggesting we should get in perspective what was actually for sale here, and is it an appropriate use of >£300,000 of government money.
The fact the publications were collected by Professor Max Newman adds more kudos and will have inflated the price also.
Everyone's missing the real story here. Who is selling these papers and why? If they had a shred of decency they would have donated Turing's papers to a museum or university long ago and made sure they would always be available for anyone to study. It would be a different matter if it was Turing himself who was selling them because he needed the money to buy fags or more of His Steveness's (praise be upon him) eye candy.
I'm not sure I'd agree with you.
*Personally*, I don't see why, if I owned something that other people thought was of historic/academic value, that should mean I'm under an obligation to give it away if I have the possibility of selling it.
Anyway, when it comes to academic papers, while an original might have sentimental value, surely the importance of an academic paper is judged by the number of times its information content is used, referred to and copied? A paper of real significance will create its own museum in the things which build on it.
If there was a collection of the first printing of every scientific paper by every genius in the last few centuries, and it went up in smoke, as long as we had other copies of the papers, would we actually have lost that much?
Why, are they in some danger then? Will the disappointed owner now use the pages to light his cigars? The Turing papers are perfectly safe where they are until the present owner comes to terms with their true market value, which is clearly a bit less than their sentimental value.