ALAN TURING
The father of computers and artificial intelligence itself was gay, and thus subject to unjust laws that had a profound effect on his personal and professional life.
Homosexuality remained a crime in England until 1967, which was too late for Alan Turing. He created brilliant works in the fields of mathematics, quantum mechanics, computers, and more. World War II saw him writing algorithms that granted machines the ability to use logic, which were then used to crack German codes for the Allies.
After the war, Turing’s work at Manchester University resulted in some more of his most noteworthy achievements. You might have heard of the Turing test: an assessment for AIs that judges them based on how indistinguishable they are from a human’s responses.
That test was conceived in 1950 at Manchester. It would only be a couple of years before Turing was arrested.
During a police investigation of a burglary in 1952, Turing was found to be in a relationship with a man named Arnold Murray. Both men were arrested under “gross indecency” laws.
Both men would end up pleading guilty in court. Turing was presented with the option between imprisonment or probation with chemical “therapy.” For the next year, he was exposed to injections designed to lower his sex drive, effectively chemically castrating him.
Turing would go on to lose his job and fear for the discrediting of his ideas until his death in 1954. Today, his legacy lives on in the computers we use every day.
SOURCES: Making Queer History, NY Times.