Mathematicians Of The Day

31st March



On this day in 1952, Alan Turing was tried as a homosexual, offering no defence other than that he saw nothing wrong in his actions. Found guilty, he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year. He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic pursuits.

Click on for a poster.


Quotation of the day

From René Descartes
I concluded that I might take as a general rule the principle that all things which we very clearly and obviously conceive are true: only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.
Discours de la Méthode