Alan Turing and the Enigma

This is a linocut portrait of Alan Turing (1912-1954). It is printed in indigo and orange by hand on lovely Japanese kozo (or mulberry paper), 9.25" by 12.5" (23.5 cm by 32 cm) in an edition of eight.

This year we celebrate the centenary anniversary of Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), British mathematician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist, prophet and hero. He is someone I've long thought to portray, but I have been stumped. My scientists are shown with images of something quintessential to their science, or the reason they are famous (or should be), but Turing had so many accomplishments, it wasn't obvious what to portray or how. You might recall his portrayal in Neal Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon'. I was introduced to him many year ago by Douglas Hofstadter's 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'¹. You may also be familiar with the Turing Test or at least its portrayal in Blade Runner. Turing foresaw not only that machines might quite likely develop the capacity to think (after all, our brains are only made of matter, and complex systems of neurons, which either fire or not, much like an electronic switch), but that we needed an objective, double-blind test to determine whether something/someone was able to think, as early as 1950, when most people were only dimly aware of the existence of any sort of computer. But Turing quite literally defined what we now mean by computation itself (with his concept of Turing Machines) back in 1936. During the WWII he worked as a codebreaker and invented the device which was finally able to crack the notorious German cryptographic Enigma machine (in its more complex later incarnation)! His work undoubtedly saved many lives, and today we recognize him as a genius and a hero. In my print, I've included a simplified diagram of the mechanism behind the Enigma with its rotors or scramblers which acted as monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, literally scrambling letters at each turn. During, his all too short life, he also made important contributions to mathematical biology and explaining morphogenesis (the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape) and the existence of Fibonacci numbers in biology. To indicate this later work, I've made the pattern of his tie look like the sort of Turing pattern produced by reaction–diffusion systems. This work presaged much later work in chaos theory.

Tragically, he lived in a time even more biased and bigoted than our own. Rather than recognizing the magnitude of his contributions to society during his lifetime, he was prosecuted for his homosexuality (still illegal in Britain in 1952) and forced to undergo chemical castration. He died two years later, after eating a cyanide-poisoned apple (determined by the coroner to be a suicide). It is truly abominable they way he was treated; while we can't address the past injustice we can remember, recognize and celebrate his remarkable achievements today.

There are many serious looking photos of Turing. I chose one of him smiling as inspiration for this portrait. He clearly enjoyed his work, and had a sense of humour (evident in the silly names he gave mathematical techniques he discovered)², so I chose to remember him laughing.  

¹I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. Read it. Immediately, if not sooner.
² i.e. Banburismus and Turingery

Dorset, Poole, Bournemouth, and the New Forest

So we continued south through Dorset, which was extremely picturesque, but not driving for the faint of heart. I decided I did not like lorries. They hog the narrow road, driving over the central line as you come around a sharp bend, on a hill, with a giant hedge of doom encroaching onto the passenger's side. There were road signs we did not recognize. RJH was sort of stunned that they just let you rent a car with a Canadian driver's licence and provide neither maps, or information on rules which may be unique to English roads. I decided one sign meant 'giant hegde of doom' as these seemed to be correlated with even narrower roads. Also, they don't seem to believe in shoulders on the road. So, there is nowhere to pull over. My mother said that in her experience, just when you think the lorry is going to squish you and drive over your little car, it will suddenly back up a mile and a half to the closest place for you to pass. I saw no such thing - though we also did not see any evidence of road accidents, so perhaps it's not as dangerous as it felt.



RJH pulled off the road at a small town he instinctively wanted to explore, and we found this:



We continued down to Poole, on the coast. This proved a real challenge to navigate a city without any sort of street map, but eventually we found the water. We asked for directions from a friendly man, with a sadly, mostly inpenetrable accent. We nonetheless, found the waterfront and had lunch near Paden Powell.



Then, we drove through neighbouring Bournemouth.



When RJH saw this road sign he protested. He said, "We've just managed to master the roundabout, but what is that? It's not a roundabout. It's an amoeba!" and we had a good laugh. I managed to get us to the smaller road through the New Forest. We didn't want to drive on the "double carriageway" (like a freeway). Rather, we wanted to see the national park, with is free-roaming semi-feral ponies. All the signs warned against petting, feeding or approaching the ponies, who would bite if threated, hungry, curious, or generally annoyed. They were something to see. There's something rather magical about a wild, or semi-wild animal approaching you unexpectedly without fear.








We went off the small road, onto an even smaller road or track which lead to a deer sanctuary. We didn't see any deer, but there were a lot of rabbits.


The towns within the New Forest were very quaint. We continued to Southampton. I missed our exit so had to navigate through the city. I was interested in what the rest of the city looked like. We spent the night in a hotel "near" the airport (or so it alledged, on the internet). In the morning we took the train to Gatwick and returned to Toronto.

We were glad we managed to see so many different places. With a minimum of planning, and despite illness, we managed a really interesting visit.

Bath

We got up the next morning and wandered around Bath. By this time, I had the bad cold RJH had suffered from, but could handle walking. We got away from the baths and the tourist-filled area and found a nice French café for breakfast. Then, we continued to The Circus, which is not what you might think.







The plaques above the doors of the homes within the Circus identified original inhabitants, like Lord Clive, nabob owner of the East India Company who figures highly in the novel I was reading (Mason and Dixon) or Thomas Gainsborough, the portrait painter.





We continued up the street to see the Assembly Rooms, straight out of a Jane Austen novel and then came back down and over to the Royal Crescent, and meandered back to the car.
















We then drove south (moreorless) towards the coast.