Alan Turing will get his own UK commemorative stamp in 2012. It will be fun to use it on sealed envelopes, as a kind of cherry-on-the-top for the traditional crypto argument that scrambling messages is the same as putting them in an envelope, as opposed to writing them on postcards.
The computer pioneer is one of 10 prominent people chosen for the Royal Mail’s Britons of Distinction stamps, to be launched in February, which includes the allied war heroine Odette Hallowes of the Special Operations Executive, composer Frederick Delius and architect Sir Basil Spence, to mark the golden jubilee of Coventry Cathedral.
Turing worked as part of the team that cracked the Enigma code at Bletchley Park, and went on to help create the world’s first modern computer. This year marks the centenary of his birth.
Codebreaker Alan Turing gets stamp of approval
(Image: Alan Turing, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zoonabar’s photostream)