Alan Turing: The man who decoded the infamous Enigma Code during World War II 

When you think of war heroes, you think of soldiers, army generals and at the most on-field doctors and nurses. We hardly associate a mathematician with a war. But what if we told you that a math wizard was responsible for saving many lives in World War II? We are talking about Alan Turing, the British mathematician, logician and cryptographer. He is the man behind the breaking of the infamous Enigma Code. You may remember him as the protagonist of the popular Hollywood film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role.  

Alan Turing and the Enigma Code 
Having earned a PhD in mathematics from USA’s prestigious Princeton University, Turing returned to the UK and joined the Government Code and Cypher School. As some of you might know, codes and ciphers are two unique ways of conveying secret messages. It’s popular defence method during the war times. As Turing began working for the British intelligence, he was given the responsibility of German naval cryptanalysis, to figure out when they might attack or which place is their next target. The goal to stop the opposition at any costs.  

This is when Turing came upon the much-anticipated special machine that the Germans had created. Known as the Enigma machine it contained coded secret texts. Turing knew that if he could crack the Enigma Code, he would be able to find out all the secret plans of Germany. He ended up devising a number of techniques to decode it, with some help from a team of Polish and British mathematicians. He became so obsessed with cracking German codes, that by 1943, he could decode two messages every single minute, a feat in itself. Experts believe that this was one of the major turning points for Britain and its allies, helping end World War II quicker than imagined.  

The Olympic runner 
Turns out, Alan Turing was not only a gifted academician, but also a talented sportsman. In fact, he excelled in sports such as swimming and rowing. However, his passion lied in running, so much so, that he was often reported to be running around (quite literally) from one place to another. It is said that he used to run 10 miles between his two workplaces, the National Physical Laboratory and the electronics building on Dollis Hill, often beating his colleagues who used public transport. Soon after the War was over, Turing joined running clubs and started participating in various competitions and even won several races. However, his turning point as a runner came in 1948 when he not only got the opportunity to take part in that year’s Olympics, but finished his marathon in only 2 hours, 46 minutes and 3 seconds, only 11 minutes slower than the winning time. This was one of the best performances in his contemporary times. Later, he was often heard saying that he loved running hard to earn respite from his stressful job.  

Turing pioneered a new field of biology 
Turing is known as a mathematician, cryptographer and even as one of the world’s first computer programmers (he came up with the Turing Test to examine how smart a computer was). But only a handful few know about his contribution in the field of biology. In fact, Turing, as a child, was obsessed with daisies that perhaps inspired him to do a ground-breaking work in 1952 on “the chemical basis of morphogenesis” (the differentiation of tissues and subsequent growth of structures in an organism). This later became a brand-new branch of mathematical biology resulting in a thesis titled Outline of the Developments of the Daisy.