Watch Breaking the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Turing (1996)

Updat­ed on Decem­ber 24, 2013: Yes­ter­day the British gov­ern­ment brought a sad chap­ter to a close when it final­ly issued a posthu­mous par­don to Alan Tur­ing, who was con­vict­ed in 1952 of break­ing laws that crim­i­nal­ized homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. The post you see below was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in Feb­ru­ary, 2012, when the ques­tion of Tur­ing being par­doned was still up for debate. The film fea­tured above is still very much worth your while.

This week the British gov­ern­ment final­ly par­doned Alan Tur­ing. One of the great­est math­e­mati­cians of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Tur­ing laid the foun­da­tions for com­put­er sci­ence and played a key role in break­ing the Nazi Enig­ma code dur­ing World War II. In 1952 he was con­vict­ed of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. He killed him­self two years lat­er, after being chem­i­cal­ly cas­trat­ed by the gov­ern­ment.

On Mon­day, Jus­tice Min­is­ter Tom McNal­ly told the House of Lords that the gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron stood by the deci­sion of ear­li­er gov­ern­ments to deny a par­don, not­ing that the pre­vi­ous prime min­is­ter, Gor­don Brown, had already issued an “unequiv­o­cal posthu­mous apol­o­gy” to Tur­ing. McNal­ly was quot­ed  in the Guardian:

A posthu­mous par­don was not con­sid­ered appro­pri­ate as Alan Tur­ing was prop­er­ly con­vict­ed of what at the time was a crim­i­nal offense. He would have known that his offense was against the law and that he would be pros­e­cut­ed. It is trag­ic that Alan Tur­ing was con­vict­ed of an offense which now seems both cru­el and absurd–particularly poignant giv­en his out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tion to the war effort. How­ev­er, the law at the time required a pros­e­cu­tion and, as such, long-stand­ing pol­i­cy has been to accept that such con­vic­tions took place and, rather than try­ing to alter the his­tor­i­cal con­text and to put right what can­not be put right, ensure instead that we nev­er again return to those times.

The deci­sion came as a dis­ap­point­ment to thou­sands of peo­ple around the world who had peti­tioned for a for­mal par­don dur­ing the cen­te­nary year of Tur­ing’s birth. The Guardian also quot­ed an email sent by Amer­i­can math­e­mati­cian Den­nis Hejhal to a British col­league:

i see that the House of Lords reject­ed the par­don Feb 6 on what are for­mal grounds.

if law is X on date D, and you know­ing­ly break law X on date D, then you can­not be par­doned (no mat­ter how wrong or flawed law X is).

the real rea­son is OBVIOUS. they do not want thou­sands of old men say­ing par­don us too.

Efforts to obtain a par­don for Tur­ing are con­tin­u­ing. British cit­i­zens and UK res­i­dents can still sign the peti­tion.

To learn more about Tur­ing’s life, you can watch the 1996 BBC film Break­ing the Code (above, in its entire­ty), fea­tur­ing 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 Enig­ma.

Break­ing the Code moves back and forth between two time frames and two very dif­fer­ent codes: one mil­i­tary, the oth­er social. The film runs 91 min­utes, and has been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.