The computer scientist, Alan Turing, suffered many years of obscurity until recently. This is partially to due to the fact that a lot of his work was subject to the Official Secrets Act, and partially due to his appalling treatment as a homosexual in 1950s Britain. Despite this, Turing's work is thought to have cut short the Second World War by as much as four years. Considering each year of war in Europe saw around 7 million deaths, Turing's work could have saved as many as 21 million lives. Turing was working at the famous Bletchley Park, decoding German ciphers. The prodigious mathematician and logician worked on all kinds of projects, but was most significantly involved in the building of The Bombe - a machine capable of breaking the Enigma Code that was being used by the Nazis. By 1942, the team were decoding thousands of messages a day, knocking years off the length of the conflict. Imagine how many lives, both military and civilian, were saved by these actions and how many of those went on to have families that would not have otherwise existed - that might well have been an ancestor of yours. Things ended pretty tragically for Turing though. As a homosexual man in a time when that was a criminal offence, he was convicted of indecency in 1952. Rather than go to prison, Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration. The conviction led to his security clearance being removed and ended his work with GCHQ. He died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning and was only officially posthumously pardoned in 2013.
