Officials ruled that he had committed a Socrates-like suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. Two years later, at age forty-one, Turing was dead. In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to a probation that involved undergoing an extensive regimen of chemical castration, which that caused him to gain weight, become lethargic, and grow breasts. Turing was a gay man in England, where homosexual activity was criminalized until 1967. Great scientific achievements-even in the service of helping to win a war-don’t generally rate a movie treatment, but Turing’s personal life provided other narrative hooks.
He also made key contributions to the British effort, during the Second World War, to crack the German Army’s seemingly unbreakable Enigma code, an achievement that integrated mathematics, engineering, and a nascent effort in computer science, and which ultimately played a crucial role in shortening the war. Turing is viewed by many as the father of modern computer science, a status secured by his creation of the Turing Machine, an abstract model of the modern computer.
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