Those of you who use the popular search engine, Google, might have noticed their latest doodle for the Turing machine last week. A tribute to Alan Turing widely acknowledged as the father of modern computing. Before there were Jobs (or jobs in a discipline known as computer science), and Gates (or gates in silicon), or any of the other household names like that Facebook guy, or even the misplaced ridicule of Al Gore as the putative inventor of the Internet, there was Turing.2012 is being celebrated as "The Turing Year", marking the hundred year anniversary of his birth. Born to parents of meager means, he and his brother spent Harry Potteresque lives in foster homes. Only, there was no Hogwarts. His father worked for the Indian Civil Service, which was a low paying if prestigious government job in British India.
A brilliant mind even as he entered his teens, he was recommended for specialized education by his school headmaster who figured that a public education was wasted on someone so gifted in the sciences.
Oh, he was also a homosexual, a born one.
