ERCIM News 91
October 2012
Special theme What is Computation - Alain Turing’s Legacy
Guest editors Gilles Dowek (Inria) and Samson Abramsky (University of Oxford)
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by Andrew Hodges
The 2012 centenary of Alan Turing’s birth has enjoyed a level of public awareness that is remarkable for any scientific figure. This is in part due to the great change in the perception of his homosexuality since the 1990s: young people can scarcely believe that British criminal law was as it was in 1952, and there has been much agitation for some sort of posthumous adjustment to his conviction. Unfortunately, just as Roger Bannister and the Comet crashes represented that particular era in Britain, so too did Turing’s conviction. This is an immutable historical fact.