"And if the physicists who understood its potential had not told their generals and politicians, these would certainly have remained in ignorance, unless they were themselves postgraduate physicists, which was very unlikely. Again, Alan Turing's celebrated paper of 1935, which was to provide the foundation of modern computer theory, was originally written as a speculative exploration for mathematical logicians. The war gave him and others the occasion to translate theory into the beginnings of practice for the purpose of code-breaking, but when it appeared nobody except a handful of mathematicians even read, let alone took notice of Turing's paper. Even in his own college this clumsy-looking pale-faced genius, then a junior fellow with a taste for jogging, who posthumously became a sort of icon among homosexuals, was not a figure of any prominence; at least I do not remember him as such."
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Computer scientists from the United KingdomPhilosophers from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomPeople from LondonCryptographers
Original Language: English
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Sources
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (1994), Chap. 18 : Sorcerers and Apprentices: The Natural Sciences
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
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