Sir Dermot Turing is the acclaimed author of Prof, a biography of his famous uncle, The Story of Computing, X,Y&Z – the real story of how Enigma was broken and most recently, The Enigma Traitors – The Struggle to Lose the Cipher War.
Like Alan Turing, Dermot was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College Cambridge, After completing his DPhil in Genetics at New College, Oxford, Dermot moved into the legal profession, working first for the Government Legal Service and then the international law firm, Clifford Chance where he was a partner until 2014.
In addition to speaking, Dermot is a trustee of The Turing Trust and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.
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1) Alan Turing - The Man Behind The Myth
If you saw The Imitation Game you may have a picture of Alan Turing as solitary, difficult to deal with, and a victim of prejudice. Yet Alan Turing achieved much in a wide range of fields: pure mathematics, philosophy, cryptology, computer science, artificial intelligence, and developmental biology. Sir Dermot Turing, the author of the most recent biography of his famous uncle, challenges the conventional perception of Alan Turing. Using illustrations of Alan Turing’s work and personal accounts of what he was like to work with, the presentation will follow the course of Alan Turing’s achievements, describe how he actually did arrive at his ideas, and assess the tragic events at the end of his life.
2) Alan Turing - Bletchley Park and the Cybermen
Alan Turing is most famous for his work at Bletchley Park during World War II in breaking the German Enigma cipher. Sir Dermot Turing, who is a trustee of the present-day Bletchley Park museum as well as biographer of his uncle Alan, talks about what Alan Turing actually did at Bletchley Park, and where this places him in the development of computing. What was Alan Turing’s vision for computers and robots, and what did he actually use computers for? How relevant is what happened at Bletchley to today’s questions about artificial intelligence and cybersecurity?
3) Who really broke Enigma?
Dermot tells the full story of how Enigma was broken bringing to light the collaboration between France, Poland and Britain and particulary the early work of the Polish codebreakers.
(Published September 2018)
(Published by The History Press)