Alan Turing

Alan Turing lived and died as the unsung hero of WW2.

He was a brilliant man who studied many different fields and is considered to be the father of modern day computer science.

He is most famous for cracking the German armies “Enigma” machine, allowing the allies to gain serious advantages in the war effort.

To me, there is no greater example of creativity and brilliance.

When Alan Touring joined the effort to cracking the Enigma, there were 12000 analysts working three shifts a day trying to figure it out. Even though the end goal  was important and there were endless resources, they were not able to make progress.

It took someone like Alan Turing to come in, bring a new perspective, persevere and come up with a solution to crack the Enigma machine.

We may not think of academics as creatives, but the father of computer science was able to take an impossible problem, and “look between the boxes” in order to find a solution. He would build complex machinery and algorithms from nothing.

as crazy as it seems, mathematics was Alan touring’s form of expression and he used numbers in the most inspiring and creative way possible