On Saturday 30 June 2012 Bletchley Park’s Turing Education Day will celebrate Turing’s life and legacy. A team of first rate communicators from around the globe will assemble at Bletchley Park to explain Turing’s work and ideas in a series of short lectures designed to make the work of a genius accessible to all.
Alan Turing changed the world. His career moved from crescendo to crescendo as he invented the fundamentals of the modern computer, played a key role in winning the 1941 Battle of the Atlantic, invented the first systematic method for cracking high-level ‘Tunny’ messages between Hitler and his front line generals, designed what was, at the time, the fastest electronic computer on earth and pioneered the new fields of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. He also proved mathematically that there are well-defined mathematical tasks no computer can carry out.
Information about the 10 distinguished speakers is to be found here. Please also take a look at the event program.
The day’s final event will be Bletchley Park’s 2012 Annual Turing Lecture. In this special Centenary year the lecture is being given by Captain Jerry Roberts. Jerry was recruited to Bletchley Park in 1941 and became a senior linguist-cryptographer. He was one of four founder members of Ralph Tester’s code-breaking unit the ‘Testery’ and from July 1942 until the end of the war was responsible for daily breaks into the German Army’s super-secret top-level code Tunny. Tunny, Enigma’s hi-tech successor, often carried messages signed by Hitler himself. After VE Day Jerry was a member of the War Crimes Investigation Unit until 1947. For 10 years now Jerry Roberts and Jack Copeland have been campaigning together for greater recognition for Bletchley Park’s ‘Four Ts’ – the Testery, Turing, Tutte, and Tommy Flowers, designer of Colossus, the world’s first large-scale electronic computer built to assist the Testery.