Sir Dermot Turing is the author of Alan Turing Decoded. He is a trustee of Bletchley Park, and nephew of Alan Turing (1912–1954), who is well known to have been one of Bletchley Park’s leading cryptanalysts as well as a founder of the science of artificial intelligence.

Dermot will be speaking in the courseDermotTuringPort of the weekend event, and has agreed to form part of the Saturday night panel that will discuss issues relating to Bletchley Park and take questions from the audience.

He has followed closely the gradual revelation of the achievements of the Bletchley codebreakers from the first release of materials in 1975 and the re-opening of Bletchley Park to the public in the early 1990s. He feels it is a privilege and a pleasure to provide a more direct contribution as a Trustee.

Dermot Turing was educated at Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge. After completing his DPhil in Genetics at New College, Oxford, he moved into the legal profession working first for HM Treasury Solicitor’s Department and then for Clifford Chance where he has remained, becoming a partner in 1999. Dermot is currently based in London in Clifford Chance’s Financial Services and Markets Group and his professional focus is on regulation, insolvency and risk management for financial institutions.

He writes (in The Huffington Post):

I sadly never had the opportunity to meet my uncle, Alan Turing. We share some very basic similarities — we both attended Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge, both have an affinity for mathematics, 51wd1kEoTrLboth have ties to Bletchley Park — but that’s about it. I couldn’t possibly claim to have achieved anything in the realm of what he did, but nevertheless I’ve always considered my relation to him a tremendous source of pride.

If we were to ignore his presence in our family background, we’d be turning our backs on a link to one of history’s truly great men. This was a man who was confident, and some might say eccentric, enough to put his name to a letter to Winston Churchill requesting his help in getting additional resources to his codebreaking team (Churchill answered swiftly and forcefully in Alan’s favor). It’s also been said that Churchill believed Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley should be credited with the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany.

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