Science Urban Legends

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

Alan Turing

If you are reading this, surfing Internet, checking email, writing docs in your computer, watching digital pictures or listening mp3 is because one brain, Alan Turing's brain.

He is the father of modern computer science. As a mathematician, he created a model for a "computing machine", several years before real computers were invented. Even the transistor was invented several years after he died. The amazing part is that Turing not only give us the idea of what will be the future computers, but he also give us the limitations! His Universal Turing Machine, although being a mathematical model of an utopic device, shares the limitations and some features of every digital computer.

Turing also was a pioneer in several fields. For example:
- Artificial Intelligence: he created the Turing Test (somehow similar to the Voight Kampff Test in Blade Runner) to identify intelligent machines.
- Cryptography: He was part of the project to decode the German codes of the well known Enigma machine, during the WWII. He created the bombe.

Furthermore, Turing was an incredible athlete. He achieved world-class Marathon standards. His best time of 2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds, was only 11 minutes slower than the winner in the 1948 Olympic Games.

Unfortunately, Turing was also a pioneer in the gay movement. In that moment, homosexuality was ilegal. So, he was arrested with the charge of gross indecency. Although he could have been sent to prison, he was placed on probation, conditional on him undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted the oestrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including the development of breasts.

Two years later, Turing was found by his cleaner with a half-eaten apple beside his bed. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning. The official and most extended hypothesis is suicide, because the social pressure of being homosexual in that epoch.

It is rumored that this method of self-poisoning was in tribute to Turing's beloved film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Friends of his have said that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability.

The possibility of assassination has also been suggested, owing to Turing's involvement in the secret service and the perception of Turing as a security risk due to his homosexuality.

So, we have the father of computer science, who died with a bitten apple and was gay. Does that logo means anything to you?



Yes, exactly. It's the original logo of Apple Computers. And it resemble in some way with the Gay pride flag.



Some people said Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak wanted to make a tribute to Alan Turing. However, that's an urban legend. Why?

First of all, the Apple logo was created on 1976 and gay pride flag appeared on 1978. Second, we can do some research and we can find the earlier version of Apple logo.



The apple was a tribute, yes. But it was a tribute to Newton.

We have made a reasoning based on our intuition and our ingenuity. Professor Turing would be proud of us.

Update: JPablo reminds me the fight between the Beatles, owners of Apple Corp, vs. Seteve Jobs, owner of Apple Inc. The Beatles used before the idea of an apple as a logo. In the 60s, a tribunal decided that Apple Inc, could use the apple logo for selling computers, but never for selling music products. Now, Apple Inc. seems to have broken the law for using the apple logo on iTunes Music Store.



And, what happends when you mix all the elements of this post. Then, you find something like "The Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corp", created on 1979, 3 years later than Apple Inc.


Conclusion: Logo designers are very original.