Dr. Henry Baird, Computer Science & Engineering Department

"Alan Turing:  Enigmatic Gay Genius"

Wednesday, October 8, 4:10

Packard Lab Room 416

Reception prior to talk in Packard Lobby at 3:30 PM

The most prestigious international award in Computer Science is named for British mathematician Alan Turing.  In the 1930's he crafted an abstract model for universal computation and proved that, nevertheless, some problems remain forever 'uncomputable.'  Early in World War II he led the secret team that broke the fantastically difficult German U-boat cipher with cunning pruned-search algorithms running on special-purpose electronic machines.  Immediately after the war, he designed one of the first general-purpose computers.   He was far ahead of his time, especially among intelligentsia, in valuing hardware as highly as mathematics:  so much so, that he argued seriously that machines potentially can think. Another eccentricity was his casual frankness about his homosexuality, which entangled him in the same laws that had destroyed Oscar Wilde half a century before.   At age 42, still creative but harassed by the police, Turing died, an apparent suicide.  He would have had to wait thirteen years for decriminalization, in England---and forty-nine years in the United States.

A Lehigh University LGBTQIA History Month event, co-sponsored by the CSE Dept.