Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy: 21 June 2012–21 October 2013, Science Museum, London

Swade, Doron

Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy: 21 June 2012–21 October 2013, Science Museum, London

Resource type

Journal article

Creator (person)

Swade, Doron

Date published

2013

Abstract

This exhibition at the Science Museum, London, commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, mathematician, computer pioneer, philosopher and wartime code breaker at Bletchley Park. The review covers the six sections of the exhibition: “Computers before Computing”; “Alan Turing’s War”; “ACE—the Automatic Computing Engine”; “Can Machines Think?”; “A Matter of Life and Death”; and “Programming Computers Today.” The review provides the historical context of Turing’s seminal work in mathematical logic, computer science, computer design, artificial intelligence, and morphogenesis, and assesses the curatorial treatment. It also views the exhibition in the context of the museological trajectory of the Science Museum which suffered a series of devastating reorganizations that all but destroyed the curatorial knowledge base and marginalized curators into near-invisibility.