He Died for a Code That Was Not Mathematical — Oversized Drop-Shoulder

01 / 02

TEE-SCI-CN-TUR-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

He Died for a Code That Was Not Mathematical Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Turing described in 1936 the universal machine that defines what a computer can and cannot do; in 1952 the British state prosecuted him for gross indecency and he accepted hormone treatment to stay out of prison. He died two years later. The print is a one-ink poster: his portrait beside a calculating machine with punched tape and two bitten apples.

A Author

Alan Turing

B Subject

Mathematics · Computing

C Aesthetic

Photocopy · Collage

Exploration

The machine Turing described in 1936 was not a device: it was an argument. An infinite tape, a head that reads and writes symbols, and a handful of rules. With that he showed there are problems no procedure can solve, and along the way defined what we now call a computer.

Then came the war and the work he could tell nobody about, and still could not tell for the ten years of life he had left.

In 1952 he reported a burglary at his house. The investigation established that he was in a relationship with a man, and the state that had used his head to break messages prosecuted him for it. He accepted hormone treatment to stay out of prison. He died in 1954.

His theorem on the undecidable stands, word for word, and describes a limit no later machine has moved by a millimetre. The only procedure that failed was the one belonging to the institution that employed him.

Details