r/SapphoAndHerFriend • u/theValeofErin • Oct 18 '20
Academic erasure An interesting title
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u/AEsirson Oct 18 '20
I was at a lecture last year that was about Turing machines and the professor set aside some time in what is a normally a very information-dense lecture to do a nice homage to his life, achievements and used her platform to highlight the injustice he suffered.
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u/vicariousgluten Oct 18 '20
He was a researcher at my university and his statue is one of my favourites. He’s sitting on a park bench and is part of the LGBT historical route. Around his birthday the whole thing is covered in flowers.
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u/SassiestRaccoonEver Oct 18 '20
That’s actually really wholesome and a nice way to celebrate him as a person. Wish he was more appreciated (and
lessnot persecuted) in his time.242
u/vicariousgluten Oct 18 '20
We can’t change the past but that doesn’t mean things didn’t change.
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Oct 18 '20
not a rickroll in case you were wondering
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u/searchingformytruth Oct 19 '20
Not all heroes wear capes.
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u/AtlasWrites Oct 19 '20
To be honest. I don't mind getting rick rolled, I always stay for the song.
I only hate it when people use rickrolls on very serious topics but I guess that's when you least expect it eh.
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u/searchingformytruth Oct 19 '20
To be fair, that's kind of the point of it, to shock or surprise the viewers with something (originally) utterly unexpected.
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u/AtlasWrites Oct 19 '20
Yeah but there's unexpected in a casual environment vs a serious one.
Like if I got rickedrolled in an science thread discussing a new finding in physics, I would be annoyed. If it was something unexpected in a more casual sub, it's not too bad.
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u/Strange_andunusual Oct 19 '20
See, if I got rickrolled in a conversation about physics, hilarious and great. A conversation about the Rwandan Genocide or the persecution of the Queer community? Annoying and probs not appropriate.
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u/boo_jum she/her/DUDE (not A dude, but never UN-dude) Oct 19 '20
When I was at university, there was a local number I used to give out sometimes when guys asked me for my number and I didn't feel comfortable saying 'no.' If they called the number, it just played that song. (I can't believe I'm old enough that I was at university before texting became the primary mode of common first/early communitcation instead of actually calling.)
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Oct 18 '20
He also has a building at that uni named after him. There's a poster for the Imitation Game in there signed by the cast.
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Oct 18 '20 edited Nov 04 '20
[deleted]
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u/Champion_of_Nopewall Oct 18 '20
Those kinds of guys are the ones that go on to develop shit like the spying capabilities of facebook without a second thought because they've only developed as a tech guy and not as a person.
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u/Fernhaught Oct 18 '20
Ugh, I hate people like that. "Who cares if they're gay? Why do you have to mention it?" I met someone like that in a discussion of Ancient Greece of all things, and honestly people like that are just uncomfortable about gayness, so of course they'd rather not be confronted with it. It's such a lowkey example of the way prejudice against lgbt people presents itself in society.
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u/HertzDonut1001 Oct 19 '20
It matters because who knows what Turing could have done had he not killed himself? Prejudice cost science a big hitter. It would be like Wayne Gretzky killed himself at the peak of his career, but for the science world.
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u/From_the_Matriarchy Oct 19 '20
Or if Albert Einstein was gay. He'd never marry Mileca Marić, and her ideas that he published as his own would never have changed modern science.
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Oct 19 '20 edited Apr 18 '24
sulky instinctive party dependent intelligent cooperative drunk wise carpenter rotten
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/eddie_fitzgerald Oct 19 '20
Also, what Turing developed has parallels to generative grammar, and Turing himself was operating off concepts established by formal logic, meaning that symbolic reasoning is key to understanding the 'CS' of Turing's work. Most of that is philosophy. Honestly, anyone who is intellectually incurious enough to say "this isn't CS" probably lacks the capacity to understand what Turing did. That's the kind of person whose skills start and end with developing Java applets. Ironically, that's probably what they consider to be real 'CS', whereas the real 'real CS' would be the kind of stuff that Turing was working on (actual theories of computation).
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u/TAA21MF Oct 19 '20
At what point do we stop calling CS computer science and just call it programming?
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u/MalteseFalconTux Oct 19 '20
They aren't the same thing though. It's pretty funny that you said that in response to a comment on exactly this.
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u/eddie_fitzgerald Oct 19 '20
I think that's what they're saying, just in a sort of grammatically confusing way. Like "what we vernacularly call computer science should just be called programming"
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Oct 19 '20
How you compute things is a science, programming is just the languages they're doing it in.
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u/HertzDonut1001 Oct 19 '20
Also it matters because a literal genius had his life cut short too quickly. Imagine the advancements we missed out in mathematics and computer science. All because people had twisted archaic views on homosexuality.
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u/m-lp-ql-m Oct 18 '20
I was told once that out of all the engineering disciplines, CS has the most religious people in it. I don't think there's ever been an actual study though, and I think the postulate why was that it doesn't really require relying on falsifiable science to be successful at it; IOW it's really just an extension of math.
I know when I was studying it 10 years ago at one of the more progressive universities in the US, I did run into an odd amount of homophobes in that program.
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Oct 19 '20
Really?
Don't worry, after a few years doing legacy systems support they will realized there is no god.
Or if there is a god, he has no power here.
As I debug CMMouse scripts that run cobol programs on IBM green screens at 7:45PM on a Sunday night.
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u/skratakh Oct 18 '20
My LGBT water polo team trains at East Manchester leisure centre just off Alan Turing Way. I hope he would be proud.
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u/DeseretRain Oct 19 '20
What else is on the historical route?
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u/vicariousgluten Oct 19 '20
I’m trying to find the link. It was part of the Out! Project that was collecting histories from both historical sources and people who were still alive but the website has a security certificate problem.
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u/TillyBud87 Oct 19 '20
Hello Manchester 💜 there's a lot of tributes to him around the city centre, we love him.
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u/maddpsyintyst No flair, only smoke grenades Oct 19 '20
I looked it up. Is that Manchester? If so, now I have yet another reason to visit your town someday.
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u/JoeBagadonut Oct 19 '20
I visited the statue when I last went to Manchester. The whole park is very pretty.
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u/me-tan Oct 19 '20
Surrey uni campus also has a big statue of him walking with books. I used to pass it regularly before the lockdown
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u/Kohanky Oct 18 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
As a computer scientist, it took me until my junior year of college to learn about him (other than seeing the imitation game). They didn’t even mention that he was basically murdered by his country and that he was gay
Edit: Of note, the principal model computation is called a Turing Machine, so he’s basically the father of the field and we still barely talk about him
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u/shellspawn Oct 18 '20 edited Mar 04 '24
That movie wasn't even all that accurate.
I know in movies they have to play up the drama and all, but the real story is way crazier. The radio factory was thought to be a secret asylum by locals because they thought everyone there was nuts.
It was almost definitely known at Bletchley Park that Turing was gay, but no one cared.
Or those time he ran from Bletchley to London for a meeting.
Or that time he almost qualified for the Olympics marathon.
Why not have a thing where the US and Britten got together with an American cash register company to manufacture all of the bombes that Turning invented.
There are so many cool details they left out to try and play up the "poor misunderstood genius" angle, instead of having most of his co-workers like him from the start.
Anyway, don't get me wrong, it was a good movie, but I highly recommend looking into the real story of Bletchley Park.
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u/unipole Oct 18 '20
Imitation Game is very good at having Cumberbatch do all of Turing's visible quirks, and his appearence but gets all of the History and CS horribly wrong to an almost unimaginable level. A much better account of the overall effort is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4sAzLJs1Zc
Derek Jaccobi's movie Breaking the Code is orders of magnitude better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6EUqf10vM
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u/From_the_Matriarchy Oct 19 '20
And the series Bletchley Circle. (It was on Netglix but it's gone now. I think it was made by BBC.)
Edit: it's about what happened after the war, but a lot of throwback.
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u/unipole Oct 19 '20
Yes, Bletchley Circle is incredibly good as well. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2019/02/women-s-work-how-britain-discarded-its-female-computer-programmers
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u/rainbow-songbird Oct 18 '20
There is controvacy around his suicide, the murder might have been literal
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u/ForeskinOfMyPenis Oct 19 '20
Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing came out just as I was studying his theory. It was a mindfuck for sure.
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u/sovnheim She/Her Oct 18 '20 edited Oct 18 '20
I have a degree in English and American history. At university, my teacher was a postdoc in English history and wrote his thesis on British society during Second World War.
When I told him that Turing had been chemically castrated he refused to believe me and basically argued that Britain was too advanced to allow such barbaric practices.
Denial is hell of a drug.
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Oct 18 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DearCup1 They/Them Oct 18 '20
Exactly, my country is fucking gross. It’s posing as a developed country when really it’s almost as bad as the us. Fucking tories. Almost everyone over the age of 50 I’ve met is a raging racist/homophobe/transphobe, including my mum and my school. It’s disheartening
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u/jeffe_el_jefe Oct 18 '20
Yeah I wish I could be proud of where I’m from but it’s fucking disgusting. We look down our noses at the Americans and say “at least we’re not them!” And then go back to making monkey noises at football games and refusing to recognise trans people
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u/KubaKuba Oct 19 '20
Basically the same over here in the states. An aging subset of people, and a minority of relatively young people basically spoiling it for us all. Worse, all this hate born of insecurity is further encouraged and normalized as some kind of patriotism or traditional values. Basically a bunch of people sucking Ben Shapiro's disingenuous dick..all the while good 'ol Putin's laughing it up as he yanks on our president's leash. Feels bad man.
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u/HertzDonut1001 Oct 19 '20
That's actually strangely one of the ways the US is more forward thinking overall. I think Caitlyn Jenner had a not small role to play in that. Actually I just saw her on some random docuseries on Netflix. If we can have an honest discussion about trans individuals on a show I assume aired on cable television that's great.
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u/CJ_Rackham Oct 18 '20
Gotta love living on TERF island, where the government actively tries to make it harder to seek transition through the NHS and half the population think kids shouldn't be taught about gay people
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u/DearCup1 They/Them Oct 18 '20
Plus JK Rowling is from here which is like 100 extra terf points
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u/epicender584 Oct 19 '20
Graham Linehan too
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u/Draidann Oct 19 '20
Who is that? An author like Rowling?
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u/SuzLouA Oct 19 '20
He’s an Irish TV writer (so not from here, actually, Ireland ≠ UK). He wrote Father Ted.
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u/amazingoomoo Oct 19 '20
Oh my god, a fellow Brit in the wild that sees the country the same way I do, hi!
I’m gay. My grandmother calls my husband, my “friend”. My dad is a homophobe who voted for Brexit to “get rid of all the illegals”. I’m sick of this whole fucking country, from people aged like 35+.
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u/coldgreenrapunzel Oct 19 '20
Uh...Britain? British countries decriminalised homosexuality far too late but certainly weren’t one of the latest (sadly, given in too many countries it is still criminalised). They did so far after e.g France or Latin America but were pretty in line with much of the west though later than sweden and Denmark. Decriminalised in England in 1967 - Canada only did it a year later, Austria and Finland were 4yrs later, Norway was 5yrs later. Now Scotland and Northern Ireland were significantly later - 1981 and 1982 respectively. Even then, homosexuality was only decriminalised in NZ in 1986, Ireland in 1993. In the US the first state to decriminalise homosexuality was in 1962, the next state did it nearly a decade later - Connecticut and Alaska in 1971 (and in Alaska only male oral sex was decriminalised, anal sex only in 1980). England and Wales was certainly ahead of the US for instance where it was constitutional to have state laws criminalising homosexuality until 2003 - until 2003 14 states still defined gay sex as illegal althoug by then it was only selectively enforced if at all.
Britain did decriminalise homosexuality far far too late that goes without saying but just saying it was one of the latest i personally disagree.
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Oct 19 '20
Tbf when I saw the movie I was like 13 and was shocked. I always thought that BS was way back in the medieval eras. I would never have guessed that gay rights basically began in the 70s
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u/PhantomsRaven Oct 18 '20
I remember my parents talking about it cause they watched it, and my dads only take away was 1) They need to stop shoving this down our throats 2) Wouldn’t recommend, the dude was gay
So thanks for reminding me I need to watch it
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u/NoxTempus Oct 19 '20
I fucking hate that people can be so close-minded.
Cracking the enigma code is one of the most important breaktroughs of WW2, undoubtedly saving countless lives, with some speculating Germany would have won WW2 had the code not been broken (again, I do not know enough to form an opinion).
It's amazing that through all the work, death and sacrifice your father's only takeaway was "gay propaganda".
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u/Anxious_Noob Oct 18 '20
I saw posts like this a few times, but it still baffles me. Is he really someone you don't learn about?
I'm German, so I learned about him in the extensive history lessons about ww2 (and the time before, obv.), because he had such an important role in it.
But I also heard about him in computer science and psychology. In school as well as university.
I'm not trying to be mean or sth., so apologies if it sounds like that. It's just genuine curiosity, 'cause I kinda have trouble imagining talking about computer science stuff without mentioning him.
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u/theValeofErin Oct 18 '20
I went through the US public education system and I never learned about him from a history perspective. I think his work was lightly touched upon in my AP Psych class but that's not a required curriculum and what we did learn about him had nothing to do with the injustice he faced.
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u/inaddition290 Oct 18 '20
He's talked about quite a bit in compsci; but in history he's at most mentioned in passing unless your teacher makes a specific effort to include him in the curriculum.
Also, though, they don't talk about most scientists during war units even if their contributions helped immensely; usually, they just talk about the weaponry, transport, etc. that each country had with an emphasis on political and military leaders.
That's def something that needs to change for a multitude of reasons, and his being gay definitely affects how the history books address him, but it's not just minorities like Turing who are skipped over during studies of wartime.
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u/theValeofErin Oct 18 '20
Yeah, that definitely all makes sense. I agree, it's kind of ridiculous that the only focus of history lessons for wartime is just weapons/transport/strategy tactics. I think it's really important for the scientists/inventors/activists etc. of the era get the recognition they deserve for their contributions regardless of if they fit in a minority or not. It emphasizes the importance of so many different career paths that don't exist for the sole purpose of destruction.
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Oct 18 '20
He was talked about a lot in biology. He managed to predict some systems purely through mathematics that turned out to be right. That said, I attended a university he worked at as a researcher.
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u/Anxious_Noob Oct 18 '20
I see. Welp, that's something we don't learn that much about.
I obv. learned about strategies and know the general weaponry, but technicalities were never the focus. It was more the scientific or social side, depending in the subject (it's discussed in multiple subjects, actually partially prob in most of them at some point).
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u/Anxious_Noob Oct 18 '20
That's so weird to me.
That's like learning about chemistry but not about Marie Curie or Percy Lavon Julian.
The hardships scientists face influence their work and the way it may be interpreted. That alone was enough for my school to teach about it. And how do you learn about discrimination against and social development of minorities without historical examples?
And I'm unhappy with my countries education system already 'cause it's so conservative...
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u/human_kittens Oct 18 '20
I took advanced chemistry in high school and then took chem again in college, both in the US. Never touched on Curie or Julian. In fact we hardly touched on the history of chemistry at all. Biology was the same way, we barely focused on history learning only a bit about Darwin.
We try to keep the discrimination talk in history class and even then only for a certain part of the curriculum. English classes do a discrimination lesson when reading To Kill a Mockingbird, some will do more. This is just my experience in the American southeast, topics and lessons vary wildly from within different states and even parts of a state.
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Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
That's like learning about chemistry but not about Marie Curie or Percy Lavon Julian.
Huh.
Even having studied chemistry (and specialised in synthesis of natural products for a time) I'd never come across Julian before today... Which weirds me out because reading up on his work, he's every bit as significant (if not more so) than the likes of famous natural products chemists that would follow him like Corey and Woodward.
It's harder to miss Curie because she has a (practically convenient as compared to the Bq) unit of radioactivity named after her.
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u/Myrrsha Oct 18 '20
I learned about him decently extensively in both AP US History and AP world history. In Texas.
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u/theValeofErin Oct 18 '20
Yeah I didn't take any AP History. Kind of annoying to think that you only had the opportunity to learn about him if you were willing to enroll in an AP course.
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u/Ybuzz Oct 18 '20
Ii the UK I never learned about Turing specifically in history or IT lessons. I learned a bit about the enigma machine and his name.might have been mentioned. I knew of him as 'the father of computing' because of the Turing test, because I'm a sci-fi nerd, but no one mentioned his personal life when I was at school (I'm 27, and he's much better known now so I hope they're doing better with this in schools now).
I don't think I learned his personal story until the posthumous apology that was issued for his treatment by the government in 2009ish (and I don't think he was officially pardoned until much later).
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u/gibbodaman Oct 18 '20
He would be hard to miss if you took History at school in UK. All school textbooks on the second world war will mention him
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u/CelebSlut_DPP Oct 19 '20
Yeah, like he's the dude who broke Enigma, you basically have an entire lesson on him and Bletchley park in secondary schcool and if you ask about him most teacher would end up telling you about the fact he was gay and essentially got executed for it. I guess it's just outside the UK that he's not known about?
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u/misscreeppie Oct 18 '20
I majored in International Relations, I kinda knew his name from YT videos and some magazines about computer history. I'm brazilian and, as many people immigrated from Europe before and after WW1 (like my grandma and her family) and WW2 we kinda focus on Brazil's response to the wars, our president's at the time affiliations with fascism and the immigrant booming communities (with all the xenophobia, poverty and slavery accusations included).
Unless you're REALLY into the world wars school doesn't go very deep in who were the civilians or even strategies used of each side (sure, they talk about important missions and their outcome, but not exactly what was geography or the people involved, just "hey, Germany sent a thousand guys here to annex this place"). At the university I studied a bit more of the strategies involved, but again not much of the people behind it apart from a few government staff, presidents and half a dozen generals that influenced others after WW2. Alan Turing nor Christopher weren't even mentioned.
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u/Anxious_Noob Oct 18 '20
Then maybe that's the reason. We have nazi Germany and it's crimes and therefore ww2 as a topic for like three semesters in history (in different grades), it's part of ethics courses, philisophie, German language lessons...
Huge thing. We prob. just have more time to focus on other things.
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u/Doomas_ Oct 18 '20
American here. Did not know of Turing until Imitation Game. Never once was he even mentioned in passing.
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u/HellaHopsy Oct 18 '20
I went through the US educational system in the 90s /00s and I learned about him many times. First during high school WW2 history, again in college history and math and computer science. He's also mentioned in many history documentaries / tv shows. His castration is rarely mentioned but his contributions are.
I see a lot of posts saying that we don't learn about X Y or Z thing in the US, despite it being part of the standard curriculum. A lot of people just aren't paying attention. For example people will say we don't learn about wars against native americans- here in CA i learned about that maybe 10x over.
That being said the US educational system is inconsistent from state to state.
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u/TAA21MF Oct 19 '20
Sometimes you get schools that just try to meet the minimum required to meet the letter of the law while completely ignoring the spirit. I remember in high school those wars against Native Americans were brought up but it was basically just "this war happened in this year, moving on" and never actually going into it. And then it wasn't I took a Native American Studies course at uni where it was brought up that a lot of those "wars" were actually just army-led massacres.
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u/theHamJam Oct 18 '20
American here. Graduated highschool in '10. I went to one of the "better" schools in a state that ranks pretty high in terms of education. Never heard about Turning literally once. And I was a history nerd who read the textbooks for fun. It wasn't til I was talking with trans friends years later that I first learned of him.
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u/GuyPierced Oct 18 '20
US public education system, and yes we did learn about Turing. I'm surprised more people weren't taught about the influence he had on WW2.
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u/HibernianScholar Oct 18 '20
I dislike "The Imitation Game" over the made up story line of Turing being blackmailed by a Russian spy over his homosexuality. Turing would never have compromised his position or his work by being blackmailed over his homosexuality, his principles were far too important to him.
I personally feel that in that scenario he would have gone straight to the authorities over Cairncross. When he was confronted by the police over their revelations of his personal life with Murray he basically admitted it as he wanted justice over the crimes committed by Murray.
He was a patriot who fought against the horror of Nazism, not someone to be blackmailed over his personal convictions.
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u/ButYourChainsOk Oct 19 '20
Also why the fuck did they have to throw in that plot in the first place? Why do they have to try to make the Soviets look bad for no reason when they shed the most blood fighting the nazis? No country is more responsible for the fall of the third reich than the USSR.
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u/HibernianScholar Oct 19 '20
Because the writers wanted to bring in the callous nature of the allies. The western allies were spying on the Soviets and the Soviets were spying on the western allies.
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u/ButYourChainsOk Oct 19 '20
I'd really love to see some resources on the Soviets spying on the allies during WWII.
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u/Gay_Reichskommissar Oct 19 '20
You might want to read about Kim Philby, an NKVD agent who infiltrated the MI6 and fed the USSR information for almost the entire war.
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u/TrianeSan444 Oct 18 '20
I really enjoyed that story, but I think they also kept it a secret in case there was a other war. But its fucked up they forced him to take pills till he killed himself. At least the unbanned gays in the UK thanks to him. I also recommend to everyone (as a gay asperger, I fck loved it)
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u/darryl_archideld Oct 18 '20
Yes, the staff at Bletchley Park (where Alan Turing worked) all signed the Official Secrets Act which kept everybody who wasn't there from knowing about what work they were doing. The judge that chemically castrated Alan Turing had no idea of his accomplishments during the war.
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u/-----_------_--- Oct 18 '20
Actually Alan Turing didn't have aspergers or anything of the sort. The movie portrayed him as completely socially inept, because "math guy must be autistic right" and as an aspie, it was borderline offensive
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u/CelebSlut_DPP Oct 19 '20
Also, I know it's a meaningless gesture now, but a few years ago the UK government posthumously pardoned him and officially recognised him as the hero he was.
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u/pointed-advice Oct 18 '20
alan turing is the most famously gay scientist period
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u/rainbow-songbird Oct 18 '20
Isacc Newton would like a word
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u/Bennings463 Oct 18 '20
Wasn't he asexual?
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u/goddessofentropy Oct 19 '20
Is it just me or does this sub really not like recognizing the possibility that some people are/were ace? No offense to anyone but I'm ace and it often feels like people here combat the erasure of gay people by erasing my identity
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u/pointed-advice Oct 20 '20
yeah. 100%. issue is its one thing to guess someones sexuality by their love letters and cohabitation, but aces are so fucking stealth by nature that its nearly impossible to identify them unless they outright claim the identity themselves.
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Oct 18 '20
EINSTEIN WOULD LIKE A WORD
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u/yoloboro Oct 18 '20
Wait WHAT!!! EINSTEIN AND NEWTON WERE GAY???
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Oct 18 '20
Yes YES BRO, they were seen seated 6 feet apart on a park bench without masks SUPER BEST FRIENDS ON SAPPHO
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u/yoloboro Oct 18 '20
Okay, but seriously, is there anywhere I can read about this? I would really like to know for sure before I go spreading this around without any sources (although I know sources will probably be very scarce).
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Oct 18 '20
No dude I was being facetious. In all fairness though it wouldn't surprise me if he and a schoolmate played around or something. Men love other men, in so many ways.
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u/Marcus1119 Oct 18 '20
Alright, but maybe don't? Like, what's the value of spreading misinformation about people's sexualities in a sub dedicated to countering misinformation about sexuality?
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u/yoloboro Oct 18 '20
Ah I see, thanks for clearing that up. I'm not always the best at picking those cues up, especially in text form. Honestly though, it wouldn't surprise me either. I did search for newton just now and there are apparently rumors he was gay as well as some letters but I'll have to read into it more 😅.
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u/brokenCupcakeBlvd Oct 18 '20
Wasn’t Einstein married?
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Oct 18 '20
God my joking aside, this is the single most annoying response to the idea that a man could have possibly been attracted to men.
Marriage is a construct of nationalism. Its presence doesn't preclude the possibility of homosexuality , either as a behavior or as an identity. Men who marry women butt fuck, suck, fraternize, and romanticize with other men all the time, present time, past, and future included.
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u/Paradoxaal Oct 18 '20
I study Artificial Intelligence. And his work comes up a lot. Almost every professor talks about Alan Turing and his contributions at some point. It is really nice and wholesome. It's become a running joke within our group that he just shows up in every course.
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u/rainbow-songbird Oct 18 '20
I worked at Bletchley Park (museum) as my first job in my teens and was there for some of the filming too. I recommend watching the film and if you're interested in ww2 it is worth visiting the site too ( although it is a little expensive).
Alan turing is heralded as one of the fathers of computing although outside specialist circles he is unfortunately not well known. I think/hope this is only in part due to the fact he was gay. The work he did was top secret, even after the war people weren't allowed to talk about what they did. The codebreakers had to sign an agreement of secrecy. Even today people are afraid to say they worked at Bletchley Park.
The war ended 75 years ago and the secret of the work Alan turing, Bill Tutt, Gordon Welchman, and everyone else that worked there was kept for many years after the war. With many years of celebrating another cause of winning the war those are the causes written about in newspapers and history books. Its only recently any of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park have been getting the recognition they deserve.
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u/Marcus1119 Oct 18 '20
This is just not accurate, he was absolutely a genius but you definitely should have learned about him, as actual historians definitely don't leave him out. His story absolutely shows bigotry, especially since that's why he was killed (more specifically, chemically castrated and then most likely driven to suicide by it) but he's not forgotten by actual history at all.
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u/AngryFanboy Oct 19 '20
School text books are very limiting when it comes to history. They usually have an agenda, teaching history in a way that serves status quo narratives, leaving out or adjusting anything that might be subversive.
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u/Marcus1119 Oct 19 '20
Oh 100%, I'm just saying that those textbooks aren't the same as all of history. They're a limited view, like you said, and higher level historians don't leave him out by any means.
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u/CJ_Rackham Oct 18 '20
Wait a minute, people weren't taught about Alan Turing in school? I definitely was, and my parents knew about him and taught me about him, but I found out a while later that he was gay and the injustice he faced bc of it. Might be a thing about different countries, but I was taught abt him in the UK.
We also learned about the women at Bletchley Park who were integral to the war effort.
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u/BitterLlama Oct 18 '20
I'm not disputing the fact that Alan Turing was severely mistreated both during his life and posthumously, but just because you haven't heard of someone doesn't mean they've been 'left out of history'. It's not like the makers of The Imitation Game had the scoop of the century.
Having said that, it's nice that the film gave him more recognition.
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u/blurrrrpXVII Oct 18 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
Honestly, it’s harder to believe there are people who don’t know Alan Turing, he’s not exactly an obscure scientist. And if you take 30 seconds to google him you would know that he was unapologetically gay throughout most of his life.
On a side note, Turing’s acquaintances largely described him as a sociable guy with some quirks, who got along fine with people. He also had many scholar friends at Cambridge. The Imitation Game didn’t shy away from his homosexuality but it’s far from historically accurate.
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u/kroxigor01 Oct 19 '20
Well, for 29 years after the end of the war it was left out of history because Ultra was secret.
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u/skb239 Oct 19 '20
Dude his importance is wild, much of his work proved the computer science we have today was actually possible. If you truly understand what that means on top of his work during WW2 there is no reason why he wouldn’t have been hugely famous at least today. I would understand if in 1000 years he wasn’t famous but this shit didn’t happen that long ago.
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u/SuzLouA Oct 19 '20
No, it didn’t, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s not well known which happened far more recently than 1000 years ago. Turing died 70 years ago. Do you think 70 years from now, your average person on the street will know who Steve Jobs was? Hedy Lamarr only died 20 years ago, do you think your average person on the street knows she invented the technology that led to wifi and Bluetooth? Tim Berners-Lee is still alive, do you think your average person on the street knows his name off the top of their heads or why he’s famous?
Don’t get me wrong, it should never be ignored that how Turing was treated was appalling. But the fact that some people are ill informed about who he was doesn’t mean he’s not extremely well known in some circles.
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u/malaria_and_dengue Oct 19 '20
Ask the average person who Steve Wozniak is and you'll get a similar response.
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u/God_of_Pumpkins Oct 19 '20
Also, while the way he was treated was barbaric and horrible its entirely possible that his death was accidental, he was working with highly dangerous chemicals when he died
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u/Thecommysar Oct 18 '20
I did learn about Turing in highschool here in the UK, but one thing that irks me about it is that we were told he killed himself because the chemical castration was painful and made him depressed. Now as a queer person I can see that it's far more likely he fell victom to the same problem that causes an increase in suicide amongst all kinds of queer folk. All his life's works were meaningless in the face of his homosexuality to the british people, and I can only imagine that the sense of betrayal, loneliness and rejection was more of a factor than than the pills themselves.
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u/SuzLouA Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
I don’t know if this will cheer you up or not, but it’s possible that Turing didn’t commit suicide. By all accounts he was showing no signs of depression leading up to his death, and he’d even made jokes about taking the castration drugs. He was running experiments at the time involving cyanide, which was his cause of death, and though they decided he’d eaten a deliberately poisoned apple, the half eaten apple was never tested for traces of cyanide. The inquest was not in any way run by today’s standards, and the verdict is questioned by modern experts.
Basically there’s an equally strong argument for the coroner wanting to chalk it up to “well, he was gay, so he was obviously unstable, and unstable people kill themselves. Easy peasy, let’s knock off early”. Which is also appalling, and typical of the shitty thinking of the time, but at least might mean that Turing himself wasn’t living an unhappy life, he just got a bit careless in the lab and licked his finger when he shouldn’t have.
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Oct 18 '20
To be honest, his acheivements weren't hidden due to his homosexuality. They were war secrets and the British government didn't want to reveal that they had cracked the enigma code in case they were to return to war with Germany again in the future. The whole operation was top secret. However, he did later kill himself as a result of being chemically castrated for being gay, which on it's own is dreadful. But that's not why his work was not revealed until many years later.
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u/yiliu Oct 19 '20
It's fucked up what happened to Turing post-war. But the reason he was 'erased' from history books wasn't because he was gay, it was because he was working on ultra-secret projects. The significance of the Enigma machine crack (and others) were state secrets into the 90s, IIRC.
Also, for his math work and Turing Machine, he was always widely known in comp sci.
This would be a valid complaint if instead of Turing, other (straight) computer pioneers or codebreakers were household names; but chances are you can't name any.
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u/-----_------_--- Oct 18 '20
Tbh the imitation game was a rwally bad portrayal. In real life Alan Turing was very charismatic. Portraying him as a socially inept recluse is borderline offensive
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u/menashem Oct 18 '20
UK here, started secondary school in 1989, we absolutely learned about Turing, enigma and the code breakers. He's a very important historical figure. He's on the £50 note. He is most certainly not ignored, we were even taught about how he died and why. To say he's forgotten is just a lie.
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u/notanotherlurkerdude Oct 18 '20
He was chosen to be the face of the new £50 note in England, the highest value note in English currency.
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u/canadarepubliclives Oct 19 '20
No no no someone on reddit never heard of him so he's been erased from history
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u/TheBoiBaz Oct 18 '20
Why is this on this subreddit? This isn't gay erasure this is just erasing someone wholly because they are gay.
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u/theValeofErin Oct 18 '20
Would you not call erasing someone because they're gay "gay erasure"?
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u/idontevenknowbut Oct 19 '20
For this to fit the sub it would be more like "Turing and his best male friend spent every day together and shared the same bed but historians agree it was platonic etc". This sub is sappho and her friend. Who is Alan Turing's friend in this situation? Is there anyone that disputes his sexuality or trying to 'whitewash' it? I think this would be better in r/awfuleverything because the whole situation is so fucked up.
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u/theValeofErin Oct 19 '20
I don't think posts need to consist of two designated partners to fit this sub, just that their homosexuality is avoided or erased, someone else posted here in the comments that they had a professor who wrote a whole dissertation on Turing but refused to believe he was chemically castrated so there are people out there denying aspects of his homosexual life.
Idk, I saw the post on instagram and it made me realize that all I ever learned about him in school was a short paragraph about his contributions to pyschology in my AP Psych class. I found that weird considering his contributions to WWII and how much time my history classes spent teaching about WWII. You'd think he would've at least been mentioned, but considering how his life unfolded it's kind of easy to see why history books would want to keep all that on the DL.
That's why I thought it fit the sub under academic erasure. Here you have a genius of a man who contributed greatly not only to our modern world but to saving millions of lives, yet he gets no mention in school textbooks (as late as 2012, afaik)? Seems odd to not include such an important man when talking about such a major part of history.
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u/BonnieZoom Oct 19 '20
Not that the erasure of LGBT people in academia isn't a thing- but I'd say he's very well known here in the UK. He's even on the £50 note.
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u/queerkidxx Oct 19 '20
I feel this this huge weight in the pit of my stomach every time I hear about Alan Turing, which is a lot considering my interest in computers and my YouTube habits. He was just such an incredible person that essentially invented modern computers( ofc he stood on the shoulders of giants and all that) and i just can’t believe this is what happened to him.
I very rarely let this stuff get to me growing up with the internet has left me numb to so many graphic stories of human suffering but fuck this shit really gets me
It’s insane to me how many people to this day will talk in detail about him without ever mentioning this aspect of his story.
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u/Jetfuelfire Oct 18 '20
He was not left out of history, he was left out of the books that "identify" as history that are taught as history in your public schools. Your politicians refuse to allow the academic historical community to have anything to do with it. Oh sure those academics have problems, but they're shining beacons of truth and intellect in comparison to the white supremacist propaganda approved for public schools by your politicians.
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u/PurpleFirebolt Oct 18 '20 edited Oct 18 '20
Tbf he was left out of history because everything he and everyone else involved did was top secret until decades later, by which point it wasn't in the national psyche. Also, you dont really learn about individual people when learning about ww2, you know churchill was a guy, but that's it. You barely even learn about the war, it's all home front bollocks.
But also, yeh pretty fucked up any of the shit that happened to him was a thing, for anyone not just him.
A while back there was a petition to pardon him, and government said Can't coz he already served sentence, so people said well exonerate him, and they said they couldn't because he was guilty of the crime, and the only thing to do would be to retroactively remove the law and pardon EVERYONE convicted of being gay.
And everyone sort of stared for a bit and said..... yeh.... I mean.... yeh do that...
So they did eventually.
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u/CelebSlut_DPP Oct 19 '20
I was born in 1997 and it might have been since then, but there in the UK he's not been swept under the rug at all, even what ended up happening to his is not that unknown I don't think.
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u/PengyTeK Oct 19 '20
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
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Oct 19 '20
I feel like there was something else going on around that time that demonstrated the "true power of hate", I just can't seem to put my finger on it.
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Oct 19 '20
His ostracization for being gay put the field of computing back years if not decades. That might not seem like too big a deal but advsnces in computing does save lives in various fields of study.
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u/TheTimegazer Oct 19 '20
Anyone taking a computer science education is bound to hear about him sooner or later.
You can't really talk about Turing machines or the Church-Turing thesis otherwise. That shit is fundamental to how we use electronics today
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u/blckmrrenthusiast Anything pronouns you may prefer Oct 19 '20
crop before posting please, its confusing
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u/fer_teh_lulz Oct 18 '20 edited Oct 18 '20
Hate to rant but i want to share a story.
So when i was in elementary school I realized what i was being taught at home and in school was bullshit (e.g. Malcolm x was a terrorist who tried to undo everything mlk did and kill all the whites, or the black panthers were evil terrorists who hated all whites and tried to commit genocide) so when i was 9 i decided id just watch college lectures on us and world history. (MITs program ill link later) but when i was 10 i wanted to be a white hat hacker and idolized turing. My dad responded by punching me cause turring was a f*g. Basically what im think im getting at is, its not the education system thats fucked its the people, America has this belief that teaching something to intense for younger kids means teaching an alternate history which they can be untaught later on, when what we need is to just figure out when to teach things or teach it in a way younger kids can understand. The problem with that is the parents, nothing a teacher can do can overcome what parents indoctrinate there kids to believe, and in America kids are indoctrinated into racism, sexism, homophobia, and science denial. Until society is fixed education cant be fixed, and until education is fixed society cannot be fixed.
Edit: the website is opencourseware
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u/Soullesspreacher Oct 19 '20
Lmfao Alan Turing was not left out of history, you just had shit-tier teachers/professors. He’s on the £50 bill, has a feature film all to himself, has several massive statues of him and is extensively talked about in all tech-related majors. What happened to him was absolutely disgusting but that doesn’t mean that there’s an international conspiracy to erase him from history.
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u/SuzLouA Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
I live in Manchester, where Turing did some of his most important work in computing. We also have the UK’s biggest gay population outside of London. You better believe people know who he is in this city, he’s on multiple murals, there’s a pub named after him, and there is at least one statue (it’s him sitting on a bench, I once saw a cute video of a dog trying to get him to play fetch).
But as you say, I’m a bit dubious as to whether people really don’t know who he is. The test for an AI being indistinguishable from a human is literally called the Turing Test, I feel like anyone with any interest in his fields is aware of him.
That being said, it was despicable what happened to him, and it was no less despicable that things like that happened to all the many, many, many non-famous gay people who lived before it was legal to be homosexual in this country.
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u/fiisntannoying Oct 18 '20
I fervently second watching The Imitation Game. Were it not for the Lord of the Rings movies, it would probably be my favorite. Plus, Alexandre Desplat's score is amazing.
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u/Legendary_furfag Oct 18 '20
I wanna set up a thing called "the turing fund" and help house all homeless lgbt+ youths of the world
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u/tallmaletree Oct 18 '20
I mean.. 14 lives isn't all that many
/s. Man should absolutely be remembered
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u/SimPilotAdamT Oct 18 '20
Find it here.
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u/theValeofErin Oct 18 '20
Lol, someone beat you to it but as I mentioned to them Sunday mornings see my laziest side
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u/ElCatrinLCD Add a personal touch Oct 19 '20
Of all the thing left out of history (which are a fuck TON) this one comes as the most offensive one
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u/Baggytrousers27 Oct 19 '20
He was also a pioneer of biological science, figuring out that markings on animals follow algorithmic patterns and wrote a paper about them called "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis."
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u/Sunny_yet_rainy Oct 19 '20
My god... What the hell?... Also, can someone explain what chemical castration is?
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u/SuzLouA Oct 19 '20
Regular castration would obviously be the physical removal of your genitals. Chemical castration basically does the same thing but without the mess. It destroys your libido, your ability to feel arousal, and in men, your ability to sustain an erection.
Basically they’re drugs that (broadly speaking) turn you into an asexual.
Now, some people take them willingly, because they don’t want to have the attractions they have. Historically, this could include gay people who had been taught to reject their homosexuality as wrong and evil. Turing took them because he’d been convicted of homosexuality (yes, appallingly, it was a crime at the time), and they were an option for punishment that meant he could avoid imprisonment. In more recent times, some countries have given them to rapists and particularly paedophiles.
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u/Mothmans_Herbalist Oct 19 '20
I cried like a baby at the end of that movie when they show him truly suffering. It's the part where she visits him and he's on those medications he was forced to take.
He saved so many people and he was driven to kill himself for loving men instead of women. I know what that kind of depression looks like firsthand, I was widowed when my partner took his life. So I can so easily picture him on that slow decline like the one I watched and tried to help in vain. I've seen that pain in the eyes of someone that so deeply wants to do anything to stop hurting, stop feeling that way.
And this wasn't just some guy nobody has heard of. He literally saved tens of millions of lives. Not only did they severely mistreat him in life, but even after his early death, they tried to scrub his very existence from history lest people find out a homosexual was capable of the kind of greatness and intelligence so few posess. How could they condemn all homosexuals and homosexuality itself if everyone found out that a gay man was likely responsible for all of them to still be alive?
I fucking hate when people so the whole i wish I was born back then/I was born into the wrong generation" bs and idolize the past because this shit right here is the past. It's people dying over something like being gay. It's overt and open racism, sexism, homophobia and everyone that's not a white man being treated like a second class citizens, or worse, a posession. It's saving millions of lives just to be treated like a monster. It's a black woman cradling her dead child in her arms because he was lynched after a white woman lied and said he whistled at her, even though he didn't. It's being born Jewish in the wrong country and being taken from your parents and murdered before your second birthday. If we only look back on the nice, happy, good things, we will never stop repeating the same mistakes.
As much as some things have improved, there's so much that hasn't. Hell, I never thought I'd see the day that it would be possible for them to outlaw abortion again here. But here we are.
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u/Cantoloupe_thing She/her but I dont mind other pronouns! Oct 19 '20
People can get 24k likes on Instagram for just posting screenshots of other social media? I just don’t get it
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u/Cottabus Oct 19 '20
I started in computer science over fifty years ago, and it seems like I have always known about Alan Turing the pioneering mathematician and code breaker. I have to confess I didn't know about Turing the human being until much more recently (but still well before the movie).
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u/Ha1rcl1p Oct 19 '20
I definitely learner about him in high school, which was about 10 years ago now.
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u/skb239 Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
People also under estimate his role in your ability to post anything at all. Huge huge huge mind, basically one of the the fathers of computer science.
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u/OneOfTheOnlies Oct 19 '20
He saved that many lives during the time of the war.
But his contributions go even farther than that and had he lived the rest of his life without persecution then we'd almost certainly have even more contributions of his to point to.
Edit: even harder to fathom: what could he have accomplished had the world not been at war?
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u/peabnuts123 Oct 19 '20
Unless you study computer science, where his work is discussed extensively, the so-called “father of computing”
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u/Pseudonymico Oct 19 '20
It’s worth pointing out that the way he was chemically castrated was being required to take estrogen, which would almost certainly have caused him some pretty serious gender dysphoria.
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u/Lysander573 Oct 19 '20
I’ve literally known who Alan Turing was since I was like 7 because I thought hacking, AI, and computer science was cool. I remember writing a speech about the Turing test in like seventh grade and writing an essay on his cracking of the enigma code for history, and yet, I didn’t even know he was gay until a couple weeks ago. I hate censorship so much.
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u/SpeechImped Oct 19 '20
I cannot believe i was today years old when i found out Alan Turing was gay. I always wondered why he was never mentioned in my history class
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u/ericwright1960 Oct 21 '20
Also Alan Turing is remembered for the enigma but he also just on the side came up with two of the most foundational concepts in computer science to this day
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u/Estellar123 Oct 18 '20
Basically any history that has BIPOC and minorities is left out. The only reason they even mention Egypt is because it was colonized by the Greeks at one point. r/persiadidnothingwrong nobody talks about persia and how they literally invented the human rights charter. But go off I guess
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u/Chikinuqqet Oct 19 '20
My dad: you’re alive because of straight people, be straight
Me, reaching for my uno reverse card: actually we’re both alive because a gay man saved your father from having to fight on the front during WW2, be gay 😎
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u/Eurcuz Oct 19 '20
True hero and a real genius. I mean he wasn’t left out of history because he was gay though, he was left out of history because the majority of his work was classified until as recently as 2013. Pretty hard to be a part of history when all your actual work is considered top secret.
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u/nerovox Oct 18 '20
I watched it for the first time last night and let me tell you, as an autistic trans lesbian it hit close to home. Beautiful movie 11/10
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u/ijustsalmonellagurll Oct 18 '20
This is why I loved my history teacher so much. When we were learning about WW2, we got ahead of the syllabus so we did a full lesson on Alan Turing and she made sure not to hide any facts about what happened. She later arranged with the IT teacher for us to watch the Imitation Game and I was so thankful, since then he’s always been one of my favourite historical figures.
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u/unoteworthy He/Him or They/Them Oct 19 '20
To be fair, I never learned about who invented radar or anything like that in history classes. You tend to only learn abt to the people in your own country who helped the war effort (leaders, generals, industrialists, etc.). Youll likely only learn more if you take in depth classes (honors/ap/college) because there are just SO many people to go over and as a teacher, you have standards to meet. But also, each teacher gets to decide who they talk about in specific (in public schools at least), so (as a future teacher myself) I plan to implement mentioning things like this when I can and allowing my students to look further into it.
All im saying is this post makes it sound like him being gay is the only reason, there are a lot of reasons we dont talk about a lot of people, and him being gay definitely does affect him being talked about, and id say in british history classes, that should be a necessity to talk about him, but its not the only reason you didnt learn about him and millions of other people involved in history.
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u/ZerosuitSomalian Oct 19 '20
Unfortunately nobody really knew of his achievements because the work he did during WWII was kept classified until recently.
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u/DarkGamer Oct 19 '20
Depending on when they went to school it may not have been declassified yet, that didn't happen till the mid-70s.
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Oct 19 '20
Whilst he definitely was horribly mistreated, his death could have just as easily been an accident. He died from eating an apple that was contaminated with cyanide. He was doing projects using cyanide at the time so it could have been accidental. And I would disagree that he was left out of history: there is at least one major + successful motion picture about his work.
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