Alan Turing is considered one of the founding fathers of computing (Picture: PA)

Alan Turing will be the face of the new £50 banknote, making it the first time that someone convicted of homosexuality, or openly gay since the law was repealed, has been chosen.

Mr Turing is widely considered one of the founding fathers of computing.

‘Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today,’ Carney said while making the announcement at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester

‘As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far ranging and path breaking. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand.’


Turing was chosen following the Bank’s character selection process which included advice from scientific experts (Picture: Hulton Archive)

Mr Carney also revealed the imagery depicting Turing and his work that will be used for the reverse of the note.



The new polymer £50 note is expected to enter circulation by the end of 2021.

It will feature a quote from Turing, given in an interview to the Times newspaper on June 11 1949: ‘This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.’

Turing was chosen following the Bank’s character selection process which included advice from scientific experts.

Mr Carney said Alan Turing was an ‘outstanding’ mathematician (Picture: PA)

The Bank had received 227,299 nominations during a six-week nomination period which closed in December.

This led to a list of 989 eligible names of people who are real, deceased and have contributed to science in the UK.

While Turing is best-known for his work devising code-breaking machines during the Second World War, he played a pivotal role in the development of early computers first at the National Physical Laboratory and later at the University of Manchester.

He laid the foundations for work on artificial intelligence by considering the question of whether machines could think.

Turing was one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers who deciphered Nazi messages, during World War Two (Picure: Rex Images)

Turing was homosexual and was posthumously pardoned by the Queen, having been convicted of gross indecency for his relationship with a man.

Those considered alongside Turing were Stephen Hawking, Mary Anning, Paul Dirac, Rosalind Franklin, William Herschel and Caroline Herschel, Dorothy Hodgkin, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, James Clerk Maxwell, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Sanger.

The Bank previously said that the new £50 note will be made from polymer, in line with other newer banknotes.

Polymer notes last around two and-a-half times longer than paper notes.

Turing played a pivotal role at the Bletchley Park code and cypher centre during the second world war (Picture: Mark Richards)

The current £50 note, which was first issued in 2011, features leading lights of the industrial revolution Matthew Boulton and James Watt.

The architect of Alan Turing’s pardon has welcomed the news that he will front the new £50 note, saying it will serve as a ‘rightfully painful reminder of what we lost.’

Former Manchester MP and gay rights campaigner John Leech led a nearly decade-long campaign to pardon Alan Turing.

Turing was instrumental in cracking the Enigma code (Picture: AFP)

He said: ‘It is almost impossible to put into words the difference that Alan Turing made to society, but perhaps the most poignant example is that his work is estimated to have shortened the war by four years and saved up to 21 million lives.



‘And yet the way he was treated afterwards remains a national embarrassment and an example of society at its absolute worst.

‘I’m absolutely delighted that Turing will be the face of the new £50 note and I hope it will go some way to acknowledging his unprecedented contribution to society and science.’

Got a story for Metro.co.uk? Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk. For more stories like this, check our news page.