CHAPTER 42

Turing’s legacy

jonathan bowen and jack copeland

I

n terms of public appreciation Turing has risen quickly from zero to hero. The decades of

obscurity (Who did you say? Turning?) came to an end with the much-publicized Royal

Pardon of 2013 and, before that, the widespread international celebrations in 2012 dur-

ing the centenary of his birth—celebrations that formed a spontaneous collective decentral-

ized yell, by academics, artists, broadcasters, politicians, athletes, and others: ACCLAIM

HIM! Suddenly Turing went viral. This final chapter surveys his burgeoning legacy: cultural,

political, scientific, and linguistic. It is a work in progress. Turing’s renown is growing too

fast for any final assessment.

finding Turing

Turing invented the universal machine, representing the stored-program computer in its most

general and abstract form; and with hindsight his seminal 1936 paper ‘On computable numbers’

foretold the capabilities of the modern computer. During the Second World War he recognized

that computing machines could carry out important tasks fast and reliably, even tasks requiring

intelligence when done by human beings. Unlike some theorists, Turing had a strong practical

bent and was as happy to wield a soldering iron as to wrestle with an abstract mathematical

problem. The story of his post-war contributions to the design and development of electronic

computers was told in Chapters 20–22.

Yet placing Turing is always difficult. He was not the inventor of the computer, but one among

a diffuse group of mathematicians and engineers who brought the new machines into existence

(see Chapter 6). For the same reason he was not the founder of computer science; and in any

case the title ‘founder of computer science’ is anachronistic: Turing had been dead for 6 years

before George Forsythe coined the term ‘computer science’ and the first university departments

of computer science began to emerge. Nevertheless, the new discipline of computer science was

certainly grounded in the fundamental ideas of Turing and his contemporaries, including John

von Neumann, Maurice Wilkes, and Tom Kilburn.