Timeline Monday 7 June 1954

Events on Monday 7 June 1954 2

• 1912 – 1954 Alan Turing The man who defined the machine Alan Turing answered a question in mathematical logic in 1936 and, in the course of answering it, invented the idea of a general-purpose computer. He spent the war at Bletchley Park breaking German naval Enigma, work that is credited with shortening it by years. He then built early computers, asked whether machines could think, and turned to the mathematics of how a tiger gets its stripes. In 1952 he was prosecuted for a consensual relationship with a man, chemically castrated as an alternative to prison, and stripped of his security clearance. He died two years later at forty-one.
• 1954 Alan Turing dies at Wilmslow Cyanide, and a half-eaten apple Turing is found dead at his home at forty-one. The inquest records suicide by cyanide poisoning, and a partly eaten apple beside the bed is never tested. His mother maintained it was an accident from his home chemistry experiments, and some later scholars agree that the evidence does not settle it. He had been under hormone treatment for over a year.