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POPSEccentricity: Genius or Madness? He gave up bathing because he believed it injurious in the tropics, where he relied on eating raw onion daily and straining his tea through his socks to remain healthy. Churchill called him 'a man of genius'; others thought him barking mad. Churchill himself saw nothing wrong with conducting the war from his bath. He was very impressed when Lord Louis Mountbatten burst in and threw a large lump of ice into the tub to demonstrate that it would not melt. Reinforced with wood shavings, the ice was the invention of Mountbatten's crazy ideas man at Combined Operations, an extremely scruffily-dressed scientist with a goatee beard called Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke. Pyke's plan was to build an unsinkable aircraft carrier half-a-mile long out of the reinforced ice that he called Pykrete because it was a strong as concrete. Mountbatten demonstrated this to chiefs of staff by firing his revolver at a lump of it. The bullet bounced back and nearly wounded an admiral.
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POPSDon't Ask...Don't Tell His name is Alan Turing, a British genius, mathematician and father of the modern programmable computer. During WWII his work resulted in the invention of the code breaking machine that could decrypt German's "Enigma" cipher. With Enigma broken, Allied convoys could know the position of German U-boats in the North Atlantic, avoid them, and deliver their supplies safely. Consequently countless lives were saved. In 1954 he was prosecuted for being a homosexual and forced to undergo hormonal injections and chemical castration to "cure" his condition. He grew breasts as a side effect of the treatment. His conviction resulted in the loss of his security clearance and he was barred from further intelligence work. He committed suicide in 1954.
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POPSMeet the Algorithm Small thank you to Alan Turing for making this a mathematical possibility. Also available in one form or another in video games, flash animations,java scripts, php.
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POPSTuring: Campaigners demand pardon for mathematics genius full at source: A month later, after Turing, a veteran of the then still secret Bletchley Park code-cracking team, had been giving a talk to the BBC on his pioneering work on artificial intelligence, he returned home to find his house burgled. Related articles * More UK News The culprit was an acquaintance of Murray's, who would prey on Murray's lovers, thinking they would be so afraid of being outed that they would not report the thefts to the police. But Turing defied this convention and went straight to the police, where he admitted his affair – a "crime" for which he was spared the normal two-year jail term in favour of a hormonal treatment designed to beef up his masculine urges and suppress his homosexuality. The resulting publicity was to prove too much to bear and in June 1954, the 41-year-old was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. He had eaten an apple he had laced with poison.
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