Alan Turing: the free-thinker who programmed our world It was in 1936 that Turing, then at Cambridge, was formulating his ideas of the Turing Machine, the philosophical principles of which power every computer and smartphone today. At that point, there was not the electronic technology available for him to realise his dream of a computing machine. By 1938, he had been headhunted to work at Bletchley Park, which was being established as the wartime codebreaking centre. He was swiftly on the case, brilliantly expanding a Polish idea of using vast "bombe"" machines - not quite computers, but still incredibly complex - to sift through the millions upon millions of combinations of the "unbreakable"" German Enigma code. Even back then, Turing reliably defied expectations. For instance: many of Bletchley's male civilian personnel complained about the Home Guard duties and exercises they were required to perform. But Turing loved it; he took the opportunity to learn to become an expert shot. He was not only driven about his work; he was an intensely focused long distance runner too. He completed a marathon in the extraordinarily good time of two hours and 46 minutes (though very noisily - apparently he would grunt very loudly). He would use these prodigious runs to relax his mind. He used to walk out into the country, too - occasionally accompanied by a ginger cat that lived in his cottage. He was an accidental rebel; when working gruelling hours in Bletchley's Hut Eight, he once established a barrel of cider in the corner of the room. He was instructed very sternly to remove it. When on loan to the US in 1942 to help with codebreaking conundrums, Turing initially caused offence to some by not bothering with any personal greetings. Surprised at how this might have upset anyone, he explained that when he was at Cambridge, and passing colleagues in the morning, he thought that all those hello, hello, hellos were simply redundant. He was not being rude; he was being truthful. After the war, when working for establishments such as the National Physics Laboratory, his thinking was not confined to mathematics and computing. As his brilliant biographer Andrew Hodges has documented, Turing's quicksilver mind also had a fascination for biology and chemistry, and about how certain patterns could occur on flowers and pine cones, or tigers and leopards. He also had interests in philosophy and psychology. To this day, educational establishments tend to funnel students either towards the humanities or science. But Turing nimbly demonstrated that no one had to stick to a narrow field. By getting interested in other disciplines, you greatly increased the depth of all your work. Turing was gay at a time when such acts were illegal. But he could never see how his orientation could ever be seen as a crime. Again, we see a man who could step outside of his own time and look at life with a combination of pure logic and absolute honesty. He had many very loyal friends who understood this. The Turing exhibition at Bletchley Park museum has moving photographs of this thoughtful man looking cheerful. He is the great exemplar of a kind of native genius - detached yet driven, unselfconscious yet fully aware of his intelligence, quirkily unpredictable yet steadfast. In other words: he is a very British kind of hero.