Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note

The new note will enter circulation on 23 June, Turing’s birthday

Alan Turing, the man famous for his work in cracking the German Enigma code in World War Two, is to feature on the new £50 notes that will be launched this summer.

Turing joined the team at Bletchley Park in 1939 which was working to hack the secret code that the Nazis were using to send messages. Three years later, the mathematician solved the code thanks to his groundbreaking work on computing.

His work is believed to have shortened the war by several years, and he is regarded as the ‘father of computer science.’ To this day it is his ‘Turing Test’ that is still used to determine the intelligence of a computer.

However he never got the recognition he deserved during his lifetime because of his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after he was found to be in a relationship with another man, and was forced to undergo hormonal treatment. He tragically committed suicide in 1954, at the age of just 41.

Appearing on the new note is just the latest gesture that the late scientist has been given in recent years as his groundbreaking work has received the recognition it deserves. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British Government for the way he was treated, and in 2013 the Queen granted Turing an official pardon. His life gained further fame after Benedict Cumberbatch played Turing in the award-winning film The Imitation Game in 2014.

Explaining why Turing was chosen to appear on the new bank note, which is the last to make the change from paper to polymer, Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey said: “He was a leading mathematician, developmental biologist, and a pioneer in the field of computer science.