Alan Turing Poster

The Alan Turing Poster in the Computer Science Department celebrates the winners of the ACM Turing Award, which is perhaps equivalent to the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. Out of all the awardees, three of them have been women: Frances Allen; who did a lot of work on compiler optimization to generate parallel code, Barbara Liskov; who was the first person to adequately describe what it means for a class to be a subclass of another, and Shafi Goldwasser; for her work on cryptography. These three women are featured among the photos of all the Alan Turing Award winners laid out in a way that creates Alan Turing’s profile image.

Alan Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science. He created the Turing Machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Alan Turing was never fully recognized for his accomplishments due to the fact that much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act. Turing was later prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts and in turn was chemically castrated as punishment. The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made an official public apology on behalf of the British Government in 2009. Our very own faculty members, Dr. Banic and Dr. Caldwell, designed and created this poster to bring to light the Alan Turing Award, the recipients, as well as Alan Turing’s history and contributions to the Computer Science field. This poster can be found at the top of the stairs in the Computer Science Department. Come visit us to learn more about Computer Science and what our program has to offer!