Why Alan Turing Deserves The USPS Stamp

Marshall Altman

Mrs. Ragusky

Argumentative Essay

09 January 2022

Why Alan Turing Deserves the USPS Stamp

Being on the United States Postal Services stamp is a symbol of great honor and prestige which all people strive for. But the person that should be on the stamp should most definitely be Alan Turing. Though he was born in England, he showed early on he was full of intelligence. Later he would help stop the entscheidungsproblem and in doing so made a theoretical machine that would create a new field of science. He would eventually be part of Project ULTRA, a code-breaking operation to crack all of the German code. He made significant contributions and eventually became the head of Hut 8, the part of ULTRA that dealt with the naval enigma.

“The main focus of Turing’s work at

Bletchley was cracking the ‘Enigma’ code… Turing played a key role in this, inventing a machine known as the Bombe”(Imperial War Museums). This quote shows that Turing was a prominent figure in breaking the nazi code which would in turn make the war shorter. “With the help of captured Enigma material, and Turing’s work in developing a technique he called 'Banburismus', the naval Enigma messages were able to be read from 1941.He headed the ‘Hut 8’ team at Bletchley, which carried out cryptanalysis of all

German naval signals(Imperial War Museums). This states that Turing headed

Even now people are trying to pass Turing’s test.(Gale) The third reason that Turing should be on the stamp is that he made the first modern computers. “In 1945, the war over, Turing was recruited to the National Physical

Laboratory (NPL) in London to create an electronic computer. His design for the

Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the first complete specification of an electronic stored-program all-purpose digital computer.”(Copeland) This shows that people's entire lifestyle and work is all because of Alan Turing who came up with the idea of the forefather of computers and phones and most computation devices. The ACE was one of the first modern computers. (Copeland) This all says that because of Turing’s works

Computers exist now. The reason that this very document is able to be read is mostly in

Part of Turing's work. Turing’s computer would have had been faster than any other

Computer at the time and hold more memory. (Copeland) Though ACE was not the first

Computer Turing’s computation device was much better than the one before. However some people might think that Katherine Johnson should get the