Alan Turing to be face of new £50 note in first for LGBT community
At the outbreak of WWII, Turing moved to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park where he designed the British Bombe cryptographic machine.
Turing’s team played a pivotal role in cracking the German Enigma code, previously seen as unbreakable. They decoded naval and U-boat messages, which revealed information about German positions in The Atlantic.
Turing was awarded an OBE for his code breaking work. After the war, Turing worked on designs for pioneering early computers including the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first electronic stored-programme computers which was built in 1950 at the National Physical Laboratory in London.
At Manchester University’s Computing Laboratory, he developed programming for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, the world’s first commercially available electronic computer.
The shortlisted characters, or pairs of characters, considered were 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 Alan Turing.
Sarah John, Chief Cashier, said: “The strength of the shortlist is testament to the UK’s incredible scientific contribution.
“The breadth of individuals and achievements reflects the huge range of nominations we received for this note and I would to thank the public for all their suggestions of scientists we could celebrate.”
Gloss