Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

This is almost two months old and was posted at the time.

These announcements always make me ponder about the people we'll put on bank notes or erect statues in honour of in 50 years and are alive and persecuted today but not recognized by society.

It&#x27;s good that Turing gets put on a banknote - and about time.<p>However, the concept art in that article is really ugly. I&#x27;m not that familiar with British banknotes - are they usually that messy looking? Every piece of text is in a different font, and it seems pretty vulgar to have a quote on the note at all. There&#x27;s even drop shadows! It honestly looks like something I&#x27;d put together in Corel Draw in the mid-2000s.

Perhaps the continuing decline in the currency&#x27;s value will give us an opportunity to see £50 notes more frequently. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen one more than twice in the past 12 years, and I get cash out less and less frequently.

Would be a good idea on many levels to follow suit and have Turing on an € bank note. His impact is universal.

I wish it were also Rejewski et al. on the bill, the Polish mathematicians who originally cracked the Enigma about 8 years before they handed their work over to Turing.

Alan Turing deserves it, but do <i>they</i> deserve <i>him</i>? Few people have done so much for their country and afterwards been so thoroughly betrayed by it.

He should be on the pound coin!

Love this, but damn they should get whoever is designing the Canadian bills to fix this one up.

Don’t forget the mother of computer science.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ada_Lovelace" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ada_Lovelace</a>

Alan Turing&#x27;s achievements<p>* Designed the programming of world&#x27;s first commercial computer (Ferranti Mark 1)<p>* Devised Turing Test, to test whether computer is capable of thinking like a huamn<p>* Got an OBE for his wartime services<p>* Inventor of Turing Machine. To this day, all stored-programme digital computers are modelled on this invention<p>* Built the machine that helped in the breaking of the Enigma code used by the German forces. This was used to decode 2 messages per minutes<p>* His work shortened the WW2 by atleast 2 years.<p>* Alan was a member of the team which decoded the &#x27;Fish&#x27; cipher, which was used towards the end of the war by the German High Command to transmit messages between Hitler and senior officers in the field.

The US needs some updating as well - see the kerfuffle about trying to get Harriet Tubman on the $20, which Trump nixed, because racism. He wanted to put her on a reissued $2 bill, but I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s an appetite for that. Symbolism matters in this case, and Trump is clueless.<p>I still like this concept from a while back:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kottke.org&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;us-dollar-redesign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kottke.org&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;us-dollar-redesign</a><p>Replacing GW with Obama might be a bit contentious, but the rest of it seems solid.

This man broke the enigma code, which helped win the war against the evil Nazis. He built early prototypes of the modern computer.<p>Your computer might not be as powerful today, or even exist without his inventions. Funny how alt right&#x2F;nazi idiots are using later versions of his technology to type out comments that seem to imply he&#x27;s on the note simply because he was persecuted.<p>But it&#x27;s easy to see why Nazis hate him. He&#x27;s not only gay, but he broke their &quot;unbreakable&quot; code. Maybe they&#x27;d have gone further in their war if it weren&#x27;t for him?