Life of Alan Turing, Code-Breaking Computer Scientist

On May 9, 1941, British intelligence at Bletchley Park broke the German spy codes after capturing Enigma machines aboard the weather ship Muenchen. His conviction for indecency led to his suicide. After numerous petitions, Queen Elizabeth II finally signed a pardon overturning Turing's conviction. If there were any single person more responsible for victory during WWII, it may have been Turing. A short excerpt from the text:

"Codebreaking at Bletchley Park

During World War II, Bletchley Park was the home base of British Intelligence's elite codebreaking unit. Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School and in September 1939, when war with Germany began, reported to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire for duty.

Shortly before Turing's arrival at Bletchley, Polish intelligence agents had provided the British with information about the German Enigma machine. Polish cryptanalysts had developed a code-breaking machine called the Bomba, but the Bomba became useless in 1940 when German intelligence procedures changed and the Bomba could no longer crack the code.

Turing, along with fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman, got to work building a replica of the Bomba, called the Bombe, which was used to intercept thousands of German messages every month. These broken codes were then relayed to Allied forces, and Turing's analysis of German naval intelligence allowed the British to keep their convoys of ships away from enemy U-boats.

Before the war ended, Turing invented a speech scrambling device. He named it Delilah, and it was used to distort messages between Allied troops, so that German intelligence agents could not intercept information.

Although the scope of his work wasn't made public until the 1970s, Turing was appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946 for his contributions to the codebreaking and intelligence world."