Alan Turing's Doctorate & Knighthood Medal Recovered 36 Years After Theft

Slashdot reader McGruber shares the news that several of Alan Turing's historic personal effects have been recovered nearly 36 years after they were stolen. From a report: In filings in the U.S. District Court of Colorado Friday, federal officials say they seized the British mathematician's Princeton University degree, his Order of the British Empire medal and several photos, school reports and letters from his time at Sherborne School, a boarding school in Dorset, England.

According to the seizure notices, a woman named Julia Turing approached the University of Colorado Boulder in January 2018, saying she wanted to loan Alan Turing's memorabilia to the library. Archivists at the library determined that the items were stolen from Sherborne in 1984... Julia Turing isn't related to Alan Turing, but she changed her last name from Schwinghamer in 1988, according to the complaint...

A month after she reached out to the University of Colorado Boulder, federal officials searched Julia Turing's home in Conifer and recovered the items.
The Guardian shared this quote from a member of the government committee that decided Turing should appear on the U.K.'s new £50 note.

"[He was] the father of computer science, a significant influence on the modern field of artificial intelligence and most importantly, his work at Bletchley Park during the second world war led a team of code-breakers to crack the German Enigma code."

Tommy Flowers

[whoever57]

Tommy Flowers should perhaps be credited with breaking Enigma -- by being the main force behind the design and construction of Colossus.

Re:Tommy Flowers

[PPH]

breaking Enigma ... Colossus

That would be the Lorenz cipher. Enigma was decrypted using the Bombe machines.

Einstein Award

[Tim Hamilton]

Seriously more on topic, what happened to Feynman's Einstein Award that his girlfriend stole? Did anyone ever track that one down?

Re:

[whoever57]

That would be the Lorenz cipher.

You are correct on that point and I was wrong. But....

Enigma was decrypted using the Bombe machines.

... which originated from a device that was designed in Poland.

Re:Tommy Flowers

[epine]

Breaking one code or another was far from Turing's sole contribution. He also did seminal work on the entire statistical framework for reasoning about the fragmentary and perplexing nature of the information gleaned, which is far more difficult than most people presume.

Colossus computer [wikipedia.org]

Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher.

Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher [wikipedia.org]

With a polyalphabetic cipher, there is a different substitution alphabet for each successive character. So a frequency analysis shows an approximately uniform distribution, such as that obtained from a (pseudo) random number generator. However, because one set of Lorenz wheels turned with every character while the other did not, the machine did not disguise the pattern in the use of adjacent characters in the German plaintext. Alan Turing discovered this weakness and invented the differencing technique described below to exploit it.

Colossal Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing [acm.org] (2017) by Thomas Haigh

... Flowers himself was ambivalent about calling it a computer in his talks and articles. ... After working with Mark Priestley on a detailed analysis of Colossus I agree with Flowers. ... Its configurable logic was stateless, used only to combine the current set of inputs to increment, or not increment, each of its five counters. The counters retained state from one tape character to the next, but the logic networks could not access this information. Neither was it programmable, as its basic sequence of operations was fixed (though many parameters could be set with switches).

The article cites Tutte in particular as someone who could be given a lot more credit as a cryptologist.

I didn't actually hate The Imitation Game (2014), but it certainly was wretched history, motivated by a wretched obsession by the fake Turing.

She had a "crush" on Turing

[bluegutang]

Years after the belongings disappeared, Sherborne bursar A.W. Gallon wrote a summary of the incident for the school, which was kept in its archives along with letters Julia Turing had sent to him over the years. “My secretary Doreen Beaton told me there was an American lady who wanted to see the Alan Turing 'collection',” he recalled in the summary, quoted by Homeland Security. “I asked her in and she told me [she] was making a study of him. She had already been to Manchester and Cambridge Universities. I am familiar with the eccentricities of Americans but I got the impression that she has a ‘crush’ on Turing.”

Source [theregister.co.uk] - overall a more thorough article than the OP's

Re:

[dohzer]

Thank you! The articles linked in the OP were confusing.

Re:

[youngone]

Yes, he was given an OBE, which has exactly nothing to do with a Knighthood, despite what the headline says.

Re:

[thegarbz]

They awarded him a prestigious degree, honored him with rank....

and don't forget persecuted him for being gay, chemically castrated him, and drove him to commit suicide.

But I guess it's okay since he was given an OBE.

More white males on the money?

Go fuck yourself.

Re:

[jabuzz]

Your forgetting Jane Austen on the back of the current English £10 note. The current RBS £5 has Nan Shepard and their £10 has Mary Somerville. The current Clydesdale £50 has Elsie Inglis on it, their old £10 had Mary Slessor on it. Plenty of women on banknotes of the Pound Sterling.

Crazy Julia

[IronMagnus]

You've got to be pretty damn obsessed with Turing to change your last name to his and give up such a profoundly epic name such as Schwinghamer.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

But which one?

[tgibson]

...a member of the government committee that decided Turing should appear on the U.K.'s new £50 note.

So Julia Turing is copped for stealing Alan Turing's personal effects and they're going to put her likeness on a £50 note? That's outrageous!

Re:

[nomadic]

It is certainly outrageous.

Not a knight

[Malc]

The OBE honour is not a knighthood. He's not "Sir Alan Turing". The original story gets this wrong. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

Alan Turing did NOT crack or break German Enigma c

[HaMonitor]

Dear Britons, kindly get it finally straight: Alan Turing did NOT crack or break German Enigma code. Three brilliant Polish mathematicians had done it and provided solution to the French and your secret service in August, 1939. WW2 is over but your propaganda machine seems still to be running...kindly turn it off.

Re:

[nagora]

Dear Britons, kindly get it finally straight: Alan Turing did NOT crack or break German Enigma code. Three brilliant Polish mathematicians had done it and provided solution to the French and your secret service in August, 1939.

Yes and no. The Polish work was indispensable and is credited in any decent history you might actually pay for instead of being slapped together by idiots online. On the other hand, it was not enough to break every Enigma message on what was basically an industrial scale. That was another hard step and it wasn't simply a case of mechanically applying the Polish work to a cyphertext. Without Turing (and Flowers and everyone else) the Polish work would not have been useful in its own right.

As with most of WWI

Re: Alan Turing did NOT crack or break German Enig

[HaMonitor]

The British propaganda machine is a good (or better) as the Soviet/Russian and American one and your âoeyes-noâ reply is the living proof of it. The official stance of British cryptography from the pre-WW2 time on breaking Enigma was that the code CANNOT be broken. Turningâ(TM)s team implemented polish idea on âoeindustrialâ scale. The poles provided the solution. Period.

Re:

[nagora]

The British propaganda machine is a good (or better) as the Soviet/Russian and American one and your âoeyes-noâ reply is the living proof of it.
The official stance of British cryptography from the pre-WW2 time on breaking Enigma was that the code CANNOT be broken. Turningâ(TM)s team implemented polish idea on âoeindustrialâ scale. The poles provided the solution. Period.

If you like you can spin it that way. In reality the Polish work was not enough and neither was the British work.

Sorry if real life isn't black and white enough for your rose-tinted glasses.