474 | 42 TURING’S lEGACy
The Turing Institute was an AI laboratory in Glasgow, Scotland, that was established by one
of Turing’s wartime colleagues Donald Michie (Chapters 30 and 31 describe some of Michie’s
AI work). Michie’s Turing Institute, which specialized in machine learning and intelligent com-
puter terminals, ran from 1983 to 1994. The unrelated Alan Turing Institute, founded in 2015,
is a national data sciences centre located in London.
There are many buildings and streets named after Turing (although strangely not in the
United States). Examples include the Turing Building at Oxford Brookes University, the Turing
Building in Auckland, New Zealand, the Turing Bygning in Aarhus, Denmark, the Bâtiment
Alan Turing in Paris, and the Alan Turing Building—three of them in fact, one in Manchester
(Fig. 42.5), one at the Open University near Bletchley, and another in Guildford, Surrey.
Campinas in Brazil has the Avenida Alan Turing, Lausanne in Switzerland has the Place Alan
Turing and the Chemin Alan Turing, and Catania in Italy has Via Alan Turing. There is an Alan
Turing Road in Guildford and another one in Loughborough, while Alan Turing Way is in
Manchester. Turing Road, not to be confused with Alan Turing Road, is near London’s National
Physical Laboratory, although there is a second one 70 miles away in Biggleswade. Bracknell’s
Turing Drive and Bletchley’s Turing Gate are so far unique.
Conclusion
Even Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion mentions Turing, whose persecution Dawkins
lays at the door of religion. Dawkins said (laudably if not entirely accurately):^40
As the pivotal intellect in the breaking of the German Enigma codes, Turing arguably made a
greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill. . . . [H]e should have
been knighted and fêted as a saviour of his nation. Instead this gentle, stammering, eccentric
genius was destroyed, for a ‘crime’, committed in private, which harmed nobody.
The 2012 book The Scientists by Andrew Robinson ranked Turing among the top fifty scien-
tists of all time. John von Neumann gained the same accolade, although his entry in the book
is only half the length of Turing’s. Naturally, the top 50 also included Einstein, who is today
probably the best-known scientist worldwide. But Einstein had quite a head start on Turing,
publishing his first work in 1901, more than 10 years before Turing was born.
Public appreciation of Turing’s scientific achievements is growing rapidly; and even if
his fame never overtakes Einstein’s, his place in the pantheon of the world’s great scientists is
now assured.