en route from cincinnati to seattle

I am reading the excellent biography of mathematician Alan Turing, who is described dryly by the author as an “ordinary homosexual atheist English mathematician.” among other things, turing is partially credited with helping the allies win WWII by cracking the code germans used to wire messages. i have learned a few things that I would describe as remarkable:

• the well-known reference to academia as the Ivory Tower comes from Princeton, where a tower there modeled after one in Oxford, was funded by a Procter, as in of Procter and Gamble, whose fortune was made manufacturing Ivory soap. Hence the Ivory Tower. Much humbler origins than I had thought, associating thought and education with purity (although this still holds), smooth whiteness (in several senses of the word), and precious rarity removed from the world of soap users.

• besides winning WWII, Alan Turing is largely credited with inventing computer science, and even the computer, both of which were born of a paradox with which Turing struggled his whole life. As a mathematician, he was devoted to abstract thought and those problems that could be solvable according to pure axioms, pure thought, without having to manipulate (as in, to handle) anything resembling stuff. When he was growing up, in the dawning age of the machine in which the machine was used as an explanatory metaphor in Turing’s childhood science books, he had observed that machines, in particular his mother’s typewriter, operated according to a set of rules that, although realized only materially, could also be abstracted and codified in a chart.

as a gay man living in a culture in which homosexuality was publicly stigmatized, (even if sometimes privately tolerated), and as an athlete (long distance runner), Turing had to have been acutely aware of the embodied aspects of identity.

how then, could bodies and material stuff operate according to abstractable rules? Turing saw only internal consistencies; he was an avowed atheist and materialist, and had no truck with any reference to external illogic. Therefore, because of his dual commitments to both logic and stuff (for lack of a better word), things which his fellow esoteric mathematicians in Cambridge, amidst a deeply stratified class system, would have assumed were incompatible, Turing became committed to making stuff that operated logically. which equals computer. There’s lots of math involved here that my wee humanities mind could not hope to replicate, but I take this to be the broad strokes of it. fascinating to me that machines and logic were once seen as incompatible with each other.

• “computer,” as Turing used it, meant “human sitting there and computing, i.e. doing really hard math, whether in his head or on a piece of paper doesn’t matter.” so, for example, in some of his early work he attempted to account for the state of mind of the computer, and the idea of a computing machine seemed like such a marvel. this also means that I get to read such jarring sentences in the biography as, “A single machine, to replace the human computer! An electronic brain!” which is pretty cool to read and let yourself get confused by.