The Bank of England has announced that legendary British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing will appear on the new £50 note in the UK. Turing was chosen from thousands of names that were submitted by the public for possible inclusion on the British currency.
“Why Turing? Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose works had an enormous impact on how we live today,” the Bank of England’s governor Mark Carney said at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester this morning. “As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing’s contributions were far-ranging and path-breaking.”
“His genius lay in a unique ability to link the philosophical and the abstract with the practical and the concrete. And all around us his legacy continues to build. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand,” Carney continued.
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Turing worked at Bletchley Park and helped crack the Nazi’s Enigma code during World War II. He’s credited with hastening the end of the war through his work and is celebrated today as one of the greatest scientific thinkers of the 20th century.
“The design [of the £50 note] recognizes the breadth and variety of his contributions,” Carney said. “The table is taken from his seminal paper on computer numbers, and in the foreground is a succinct representation of a Turing machine, with the ticker tape that records Turing’s birthdate in binary code.”
“In the background are images of the Ace [Automatic Computing Engine] Pilot machine and a section of the technical…
