Fate Hangs by a Thread

I enjoyed reading a tribute to Alan Turing Jennifer Ouellette on the Cocktail Party Physics web site. It ends with this sad note:

Britain hounded its war-hero genius to death because he was gay. Of course, no citizen should be so persecuted. Still, I can't help but be astonished by yet another example of the self-destruction implicit in a tribe's impulse to repress its outliers. Turing's colleague, Jack Good, summarized this way (as quoted in Hilton's memoir): "Fortunately, the authorities at Bletchley Park had no idea Turing was a homosexual; otherwise, we might have lost the war."

I've always been puzzled by the common fear of the oddballs and eccentrics of mankind. I find them fascinating. Most people loathe and fear them. I just don't understand this. To me they are interesting because they are like voyagers who have gone to exotic lands and come back to report something the rest of us have failed to see. They enrich our lives. But many people fear the different. Sad.

I've probably lost all readers at this point, but here is a bit about the genius that was Turing:

Only once in my life have I ever heard a mathematician refer to a contemporary as a "genius." The person doing the referring was the well known topologist, Peter Hilton. He was visiting Yale for a few days in the early 1970's, and, since I was a graduate student doing my dissertation research in topology, I was invited to the supper in his honor. I remember a broad-faced man who laughed easily and was brightened by conversation. I told him I was interested in applications, an eccentric impulse by the standards of the mathematicians then at Yale, who were proudly "pure."

Hilton surprised me by saying that he himself had done some applied mathematics. He was British, and during World War II he had been enlisted into the group at Bletchley Park (north of London) working to break the German secret codes and ciphers. He didn't disapprove of my interest in control theory and differential equations, but he urged me to complete my work in topology. He assured me that to be a good applied mathematician, you have to be a good pure mathematician. (I would respectfully debate the point with him today.)

It was in recounting his experiences with the British cryptographers that he let drop his unusual comment about genius. He said something like, "Normally, somebody tells you about a result he's proven, and you think 'I could have done that. I'm just as bright as he is.' Of course you wouldn't say it out loud. But Alan would do something, and I'd be forced to admit to myself: I never would have been able to think of that."

Hilton went on to tell the story of how Alan Turing had taken a set of documents encoded with the German Enigma machine, went away by himself to think, and proved something important about how they had been generated -- proved in the sense of a mathematical proof and important in the sense that it led to breaking the German naval codes, allowing Britain to defeat the German U-boat blockade in 1941 and thereby survive the war.

I thought of my chat with Prof. Hilton when Turing was mentioned recently in the news. The Baltimore Sun headline on Sept. 11, 2009, was "British government apologizes for 'inhumane' treatment of gay wartime codebreaker Alan Turing."

The whole post by Alex Morgan is worth reading.