Dangerous Knowledge & Breaking the Code: Two Films about Alan Turing on His 100th Birthday

Today marks what would be the 100th birth­day of Alan Tur­ing, one of the great math­e­mati­cians of the 20th cen­tu­ry, who laid the foun­da­tions for com­put­er sci­ence by devel­op­ing the con­cepts of “algo­rithms” and “com­put­ing machines.” (See his sem­i­nal 1936 paper “On Com­putable Num­bers.”) Tur­ing also played a key role in break­ing the Nazi Enig­ma code dur­ing World War II. In 1952 he was con­vict­ed of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and chem­i­cal­ly cas­trat­ed by the British gov­ern­ment. Not long after, in 1954, he com­mit­ted sui­cide. Although the British gov­ern­ment has since offered an apol­o­gy for bring­ing Tur­ing to ruin, it has stead­fast­ly refused to par­don him.

To pay trib­ute to Tur­ing, we’re bring­ing back from our archive two films explor­ing Tur­ing’s life and times. Above, we first have Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge, the BBC’s 90-minute doc­u­men­tary that takes a close look at four math­e­mati­cians — Georg Can­tor, Lud­wig Boltz­mann, Kurt Gödel and Tur­ing – whose think­ing pro­found­ly influ­enced mod­ern math­e­mat­ics but also drove them (or so the pro­gram argues) to insan­i­ty and even­tu­al­ly sui­cide. Part 1 is above, and Part 2 is here.

And then to learn more about Tur­ing’s exploits as a World War II code break­er, you can watch the 1996 BBC film Break­ing the Codefea­tur­ing Derek Jaco­bi as Tur­ing and Nobel Prize-win­ning play­wright Harold Pin­ter as the mys­te­ri­ous “Man from the Min­istry.” Direct­ed by Her­bert Wise, the film is based on a 1986 play by Hugh White­more, which in turn was based on Andrew Hodge’s 1983 book Alan Tur­ing: The Enig­maBreak­ing the Code has been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!


by | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (1)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.