Meeting a genius
Peter B. Hilton · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017
I had the good fortune to work closely with Alan Turing and to know him well for the last 12 years of his short life. It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensitivity of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us. Before the war, in 1935–36, Turing had done fundamental work in mathematical logic and had invented a concept that has come to be known as the ‘universal Turing machine’ (see Chapter 6). His purpose was to make precise the notion of a computable mathematical function, but he had in fact provided a blueprint for the most basic principles of computer design and for the foundations of computer science. I joined the distinguished team of mathematicians and first-class chess players working on the Enigma code in January 1942. Alan Turing was the acknowledged leading light of that team. However, I must emphasize that we were a team—this was no one-man show! Indeed, Turing’s contribution was somewhat different from that of the rest of the team, being more concerned with improving our methods, especially the machines we used to help us, and less concerned with our daily output of deciphered messages. It was due to the efforts of Turing and the entire team that Churchill was able to describe our work as ‘my secret weapon’.