To this day, educational establishments tend to funnel students either towards the humanities or science. But Turing nimbly demonstrated that no one had to stick to a narrow field. By getting interested in other disciplines, you greatly increased the depth of all your work.
Turing was gay at a time when such acts were illegal. But he could never see how his orientation could ever be seen as a crime. Again, we see a man who could step outside of his own time and look at life with a combination of pure logic and absolute honesty. He had many very loyal friends who understood this. The Turing exhibition at Bletchley Park museum has moving photographs of this thoughtful man looking cheerful. He is the great exemplar of a kind of native genius – detached yet driven, unselfconscious yet fully aware of his intelligence, quirkily unpredictable yet steadfast. In other words: he is a very British kind of hero.
