In June, the Bank of England started distributing a new £50 note that features the likeness of Alan Turing—a mathematician who helped crack German encryptions during World War II, saving untold numbers of lives. After the war, Turing worked on designs for early computers and explored artificial intelligence, laying the foundation for modern computing.
Yet Turing’s achievements were little-known during his lifetime—in part because they were classified during the Cold War, but also because he was convicted in the 1950s of homosexuality, a criminal offense in Britain at the time. Turing was ordered to undergo chemical castration, and he lost security clearances he needed to continue his groundbreaking work in cryptology and technology. Within two years of his conviction, he was found dead of an apparent suicide, at age 41.
“Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today,” said Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, in announcing the new £50 note. “As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as a war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far ranging and path breaking. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand.”
To celebrate Turing’s incredible contributions and shed light on the value that diversity brings to technological innovation, Chicago Booth hosted From Alan Turing to Today: How Diversity and Inclusion Can Drive Innovation in Technology, the latest event in the school’s D&I Dialogues series.
The talk was supported by two Booth research centers with missions that tie directly into the connections between innovation and social equity—the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, which promotes research that accelerates social change, and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which in part promotes the commercialization of ideas that have a meaningful impact on society.
Moderated by deputy dean Randall Kroszner, the Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics and a former governor of the Federal Reserve, the event featured two London-based experts: Erika Brodnock, cofounder of Extend Ventures, a not-for-profit using big data and machine learning to diversify access to venture capital, and Juergen Maier, former CEO of the tech company Siemens UK and chair of Digital Catapult, a nonprofit driving the early adoption of A.I.
Both Brodnock and Maier have had broad impact in their fields and brought their own diverse perspectives to the conversation. A Black woman who came from a disadvantaged household, Brodnock started a family at a young age and only finished college later in adulthood. Inspired by her children’s love of computer games, she left the public sector after a decade to develop an app from her kitchen table—a multi-award-winning digital game that helps children build their emotional intelligence skills to set them up for success later in life.
Maier grew up as a gay man under Section 28, a former British law prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality. He kept his sexual orientation private for the first 15 of his 30 years at the tech company Siemens UK. Maier finally decided “enough is enough,” and that he would bring the “real Juergen Maier” to the C-suite.