Medium Acrylic

Alan Mathison Turing

The portrait of Alan Turing is not for sale for anything less than the asking price. The proceeds of the sale of this piece will go towards mental health, student and gay support charities.

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British pioneering computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

My title for the portrait is ‘The Alan Mathison Turing Test -11101111000. The number is his birthday in binary code and I asked for that to be used as the asking price for the portrait. The proceeds of the sale of this piece will go towards mental health, student and gay support charities. Now there are two ways to calculate this number…either take it at face value and pay £11101111000 or change the number from binary base 2 to decimal base 10 and end up with Alan Turing’s birth date of 1912. In my opinion the binary base 2 is the correct evaluation of this piece and the money would go towards charities and benefit individuals who work in difficult if not impossible conditions.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic; it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.

After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when such behaviour was still a criminal act in the UK. He accepted treatment with oestrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is equally consistent with accidental poisoning.[8] In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for “the appalling way he was treated”. Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.