Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician whose 1936 paper formalized the modern concept of computation through what is now called the Turing machine, and who led the team at Bletchley Park that broke the German Enigma cipher during the Second World War, work credited with shortening the war significantly. In 1952 he was prosecuted under British law for homosexual acts, then a criminal offense, and accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison; he died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning, ruled a suicide by the inquest at the time, a ruling some later biographers have questioned as inconclusive. He received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013.