Week 11 : Alan Turing

The Riddle Who Unlocked the Enigma

‘The Imitation Game’ Dramatizes the Story of Alan Turing

Alan Turing, the figure at the center of the already much praised film,“The Imitation Game,” which opens Nov. 28, is probably better known to computer scientists than he is to most moviegoers.  Turing, a British mathematician, is now widely credited with helping to develop the theoretical underpinnings for  modern computing. He was also a war hero of sorts, largely responsible for cracking the notoriously difficult Enigma code, which the Germans used for virtually all their military communication in World War II. Churchill believed that his was the single biggest contribution to Allied victory.  

But Turing, obsessed with ciphers all his life, was himself a puzzle and a bundle of contradictions.  He was famously eccentric and antisocial, more at home with numbers than with people. He was also forthrightly gay at a time when homosexual activity was illegal in Britain, and in 1952, he was convicted on charges of indecency.  Instead of prison, he chose to be chemically castrated, and two years later, at the age of 41, miserable over the changes the hormones had wreaked in him, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide.  His death was almost certainly a suicide, possibly even a re-enactment of a scene in his favorite movie, “Snow White,” though his mother insisted that he was just sloppy with chemicals, and to this day there are conspiracy theorists who believe that he was assassinated by MI6, fearful that he was a security risk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/movies/the-imitation-game-dramatizes-the-story-of-alan-turing.html?_r=0

Structure of the Lead：

   WHO- Alan Turing

   WHEN- World War II

WHAT- helped to develop the theoretical underpinnings for modern computing

WHY- to crack the notoriously difficult Enigma code

   WHERE- not given

   HOW-not given

Keywords：

1. underpinning: 基礎

   2. Allied: 同盟國

   3. cipher: 密碼

   4. antisocial : 不善交際的

   5. indecency: 猬褻

   6. castrated: 閹割

   7. conspiracy: 共謀者