Alan Turing – a belated 80 years late tribute

Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing will feature on the new design of the Bank of England’s £50 note. He was the technical genius behind Britain’s successful efforts to break German codes in World War II and was a mathematician, logician, computer scientist. His “Computable Numbers,” 1937, is considered one of the outstanding scientific papers of the 20th century, a blueprint for what would become the electronic digital computer and his “Universal Turing Machine” was an ancestor for the entire information age.

He got a posthumous apology from PM Gordon Brown for his treatment as a homosexual. There is now a suggestion that his supposed suicide in 1954 might have just been a chemical accident.

Born 23 June 1912 at 2.15 am London (his mother told Charles Harvey) he did have Uranus in its own sign, scientific Aquarius, exactly conjunct the Midheaven which sounds spot on. Though others placings in his chart are marginally puzzling. He had Cancer Sun, Mercury and Gemini Pluto Venus in the 2^nd which rather suggests an obsession with money which doesn’t emerge from biographical details.

Genius-level mathematicians usually have very strong Neptune oddly enough and his Neptune in the 3^rd house of thinking and communication was on the focal point of a T Square to a Moon opposition North Node. But it still seems strange to contemplate a fuzzy 3^rd house Neptune as being the driving force to world-changing ideas. His only earth planet is Saturn in Taurus in the 12^th sextile Uranus MC (= inventive) and sextile Neptune (= intuitive and creative).

His seminal paper on computable numbers would be written during the highly creative Saturn opposition Neptune of the mid-1930s. His time at Bletchley Park during WW11 saw him in his first Saturn return and had tr Uranus and Saturn trine his Uranus Midheaven, conjunct his Gemini Ascendant, square his Solar Arc Uranus MC and opposition his Jupiter. So good for flashes of intuition and a significant moment for him in his career.

When he died from cyanide poisoning on 7 June 1954 it was thought he made his suicide look deliberately accidental to protect his mother, though media stories are now promoting the notion that he mistakenly ingested the cyanide from a sloppy experiment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was suicide since he had tr Pluto conjunct his Sun/Moon midpoint that year which can be pretty anguished plus tr Uranus conjunct his very emphasised Neptune which would make him exceptionally highly strung; and tr Saturn in a career-setback square to his MC Uranus. On top of that he had tr Neptune, tr Uranus and tr Saturn all hitting Mars midpoints which would make him feel undermined, highly aggravated and depressed.

There’s no way of knowing but the fact that he appeared together to friends and colleagues is hardly a guide. People have an extraordinary way of hiding their deeper agonies from those around.

He had a good many creative quintiles and septiles in his chart. His craftsman 5^th Harmonic is especially strong and talented with an Air Grand Trine formed into two Kites. His ‘wild genius’ 7^th Harmonic is also rock solid with a Fixed Grand Square involving his Midheaven and the North Node – so tying him into the zeitgeist. His obsessional-idea 11^th Harmonic and making-a-mark-on-history 17^th Harmonic (like Steve Jobs) are also strong.