Codebreaker Page #6

insupportable tragedy of Turing's fate

is what happens when

deeply institutionalised English intellectuals

encounter what life's like

outside the walls.

They forget and cannot imagine

how evil and vicious life can be.

Spring, 1953.

Alan Turing had been visiting

Dr Greenbaum for six months.

For some mad reason the number of petals

on most flowers is a Fibonacci number.

Each number the sum

of the previous two, yes?

1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 34...

So...

Our father was very interested

with everything that Turing was doing.

I think he recognised a genius.

And in talking and sharing ideas,

it must have been fascinating for him.

Cells don't have a mind of their own.

But a clump of cells will split

and eventually some of the cells

will become the backbone of a bird

and some of the others

will become its wings.

But how do the individual cells know

what part of the organism to become?

So I asked myself whether there might be

some mathematical underpinning

to patterns that occur in nature...

like the spots on a cow

or the petals on this daisy.

Turing had been working on

a revolutionary idea

that mathematics can in principle describe

a process called morphogenesis

the way shapes and patterns emerge

in living organisms as they develop.

After the war, Turing got interested in biology.

He got interested in plants,

and the patterns in plants.

He was also interested in markings on animals.

Why are tigers striped,

leopards have spots?

And the idea that there could be

a mathematical theory of stripes and spots

was something that biologists

just hadn't really thought about.

And for that matter,

neither had the mathematicians.

People did not put

those two things together.

So Turing was right out on the forefront

of mathematical biology

that's now become very important.

What he did, he came up with

a mathematical equation

that described how the patterns formed.

If you look at tropical fish you'll see that

there are spots, there are stripes...

How does that actually come about?

And Alan Turing, in the early 1950s,

really began to attack this problem.

And the way in which he approached this

was from a very pure mathematical point of view.

This equation shows that chemicals

following incredibly simple mathematical rules

can, in principle, spontaneously create

the markings on living creatures.

It's such an interesting equation

because it looks very simple...

it doesn't sort of scream

stripes or spots at you.

But as soon as you

start thinking about it

certainly when Turing

started thinking about it

he had had this big insight

that patterns are going to form.

The rules are not just put black here,

put white there

put black here, put white there

they are not paint zebra by numbers rules.

There are just a naturally running

mathematical system

which by some beautiful feature

of the mathematics

you crank the handle on the mathematics

and out comes the stripes or the spots.

One of the first areas

in which he applied this

was to explain the black

and white dappling on cows

and he published a famous paper

his morphogenesis paper, explaining that.

You can even draw some sort of parallel

between what Turing did for nature

and what he did in Bletchley Park.

Turing is decoding nature.

He had an almost physical feeling for how

those equations moved and played together.

And probably the closest analogy for me

is of a composer.

Turing is a little bit like Mozart.

He could hear the whole glorious structure

of it somewhere inside his head.

Turing really set the scene for a lot

of science that is now going on

50 or 60 years after he started this work.

I don't expect you to read my paper

as fascinated as you appear to be

in the activities of my imagination.

To me, morphogenesis is a giant

beautiful mathematical dream

but to you - I think it would just appear

a series of scary mathematical functions.

In a funny way, he had returned

to where he started intellectually.

When he was a boy at Sherborne,

he was very interested in botany and biology.

There's of course that famous image of him

during the hockey game -

watching the daisies grow.

Turing effectively came full circle

and returned to that period in his youth.

As their sessions continued,

Greenbaum saw Turing not just as a patient

but also as a friend.

I think the empathy that he developed

with Alan Turing was very much that.

It was a friendship thing that

developed out of the medical relationship.

He was part of the family.

He was very friendly towards me.

And Alan would come

and sit by me and talk to me

and take an interest in what I was doing.

I just liked him as a person.

As a child, I would sit there

on the floor playing the solitaire game.

And he would sit there chatting.

And then out of the blue

this letter arrived in the post.

It says, 'Dear Maria. It is just to tell you

how to do the solitaire puzzle.'

And there he's drawn a little diagram.

And then he goes on to close the letter

'I hope you all have a very nice

holiday in Italian Switzerland.

I shall not be very far away

at Club Mediterrane,

Ipsos, Corfu, Greece.

Yours, Alan Turing.'

During this period, Turing made

a couple of trips to the continent.

British gay men often went abroad because

they were able to live more freely abroad.

There was not this constant

looming threat of arrest.

He sent us a card from Greece.

'I've met the most lovely

young man on the beach', he says.

The continent offered joys, pleasures,

especially after the war.

And Greece had this mythological status.

And by the 1950s, Paris, parts of Scandinavia,

offered these golden opportunities.

During this period, he decided to make

a trip to Bergen, Norway for a holiday.

He caught the ferry here in Newcastle

and it was a ferry ride

right out there across the North Sea.

Norway represented for him

an alternative to the much more rigid,

repressive atmosphere of England at the time.

I've been learning Norwegian.

I rather like Norway.

It may become a routine.

They have dances there for men only.

Men dancing with men. Imagine!

While he was in Bergen,

he met a young Norwegian man named Kjell

with whom, as he described it,

he shared a drunken kiss under a flag post.

This episode, which seemed very innocent

was unfortunately to have very,

very serious repercussions for him.

There was a boy from Norway

who apparently came to visit me

but something happened involving

the police and I never got to see him.

His name was Kjell.

He wrote to me to say

he was coming to visit.

And, as I understand it, he arrived

but before he could make contact

it appears he was chased by the police

all over the north of bloody England

and finally he went home.

He was quiet.

Handsome.

A winning combination!

I know they've been watching my house.

Perhaps that's what spooked him.

I wish they'd leave me alone.

An important question is

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