The Bank of England unveiled the design for its new £50 banknote last week and it was interesting to see that the new design heavily features the legendary codebreaker, Alan Turing. The design of the banknote includes various puzzles which you can see and try solving here before the bill goes into circulation next year.
Turing is famous for breaking the Nazi’s Enigma machine, portrayed in the 2014 film the Imitation Game. In addition to his contribution to the war effort, he was an influential figure in the field of computer science. He developed the concept of Turing Machines which all CS students at Penn learn when taking CIS262. The Turing award, the Nobel prize equivalent for computer science, is named after him as well.
While it is exciting to see Turing contributions further recognized by the public, I feel mixed given that he wasn’t able to receive this while he was alive and was instead wrongly persecuted for his sexuality.
