Security News > 2021 > March > Alan Turing’s £50 banknote officially unveiled

Regular Naked Security readers will know we're huge fans of Alan Turing OBE FRS. He was chosen in 2019 to be the scientist featured on the next issue of the Bank of England's biggest publicly available banknote, the bullseye, more properly Fifty Pounds Sterling.

Programming languages that are expressive enough to simulate a Turing machine, and therefore could be used to program a theoretical solution to any computational problem, are known as Turing complete.

Intriguingly, Turing showed in the same paper that even with a universal computing device, it's not possible to write a program that can unerringly examine another program and predict its final behaviour.

Sadly, little more than three years later, Turing was dead. Turing was gay in an era when that was proscribed by law in Britain.

It's now official: the Bank of England has just unveiled the Alan Turing £50 originally announced in 2019.

T]he £50 is the biggest English banknote in circulation, in both size and value, so perhaps it is a fitting tribute for Turing after all - one that will remind us of the huge value of mathematicians and scientists who can blend theory and practice in ways that advance the world as a whole.

News URL

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/03/26/alan-turings-50-banknote-officially-unveiled/