able to think, as early as 1950, when most people were only dimly aware of the existence of any sort of computer. Turing quite literally defined what we now mean by computation itself (with his concept of Turing Machines) back in 1936. During WWII he worked as a codebreaker & on the device which was finally able to crack the notorious German cryptographic Enigma machine (in its more complex later incarnation)! His work undoubtedly saved many lives, & today we recognize him as a genius 🧵2/

and a hero. In my print, I’ve included a simplified diagram of the mechanism behind the Enigma with its rotors or scramblers which acted as monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, literally scrambling letters at each turn. During, his all too short life, he also made important contributions to mathematical biology & explaining morphogenesis (the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape) & the existence of Fibonacci numbers in biology. To indicate this later work, I’ve made 🧵