The bank of England has announced that the famous mathematician Alan Turing will be featured on the new £50 banknote.
He was the one who cracked the Enigma code during World War II. He was selected from total nominations of 227,299. The announcement was made by the governor of the bank Mark Carney after he topped the final list of 12 shortlisted candidates.
The shortlisted characters, or pairs of characters, were Mary Anning, Paul Dirac, Rosalind Franklin, William Herschel, and Caroline Herschel, Dorothy Hodgkin, Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage, Stephen Hawking, James Clerk Maxwell, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Sanger, and Alan Turing.
During the ceremony, Carney said that “Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today. As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far-ranging and path-breaking. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand,”.
The note of £50 is still in circulation in the English market with an estimated value of 17.2 billion pounds according to the bank. With the said announcement, this would be last currency note England to switch from paper to polymer which will make the currency more durable and secure.
Turing died at the age of 41 in 1954 after being poisoned by cyanide. He was involved in case of harassment and inappropriate behavior with a 19-year-old boy from Manchester. Turing was recently given a posthumous royal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II in 2013 over the said case that occurred in 1952. William Jones, a Manchester-based computer scientist initially started a movement in favor of Turing that got supported by 37,000 individuals. He regarded the decision as “a massive acknowledgment of his mistreatment and unprecedented contribution to society”.
