Alan Mathison Turing:  23rd June 1912 – 7th June 1954.

Alan Turing was a much maligned genius who was thought to be, indeed was, vilified for being a homosexual: in an age when such matters were not openly discussed in polite society. 
Until 1967 in the UK homosexuality was a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment.
He was eventually employed by the UK government Code and Cipher school at their code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park in what was then Buckinghamshire.
When he was first interviewed it was not known just how brilliant he was at solving puzzles of all types. He was by nature a very secretive person whose social skills were non-existent, being terse and extremely insular. He preferred to live in his own little world of puzzles and code-breaking.
It was a totally unexpected bonus for the allies when the German Enigma encoding machine was sensationally captured, without the German High Commands knowledge, on an enemy submarine.
Turing and his colleagues were tasked with breaking the coding system. Months passed and no progress was made. 
Turing was spending hour upon hour locked away in a garage on the Bletchley Park estate building a machine which he claimed would break the code faster than any team of cryptologists could ever do.
During two years at Princeton University Turing built what later came to be known as the Turing machine. It was basically a “mechanical computer”. 
Later he was to build a Turing Universal Machine which we would today understand as a mechanical computing machine. Electronics as such were not yet known. 
His singular attitude in everything he did made him disliked by his fellow analysts because, they were expected to cover his workload whilst he played with his machine.
A product of the English public school system, having been at Sherborne School in Dorset, England his home life was not a happy one.
He was being moved around to various foster parents due to his parents living and working in India. 
He formed a powerful attraction for a school friend Christopher Morcom who was a year older. Turing himself believed he had what in those days were considered abnormal sexual leanings.
They shared a deep understanding of such things as artificial intelligence and other such highly advanced subjects. They would communicate by way of encrypted notes, from which Turing took great pleasure in deciphering.
Turing is credited with being the leader of the team which broke the code used by the Nazi Germans in their Enigma coding machine. The breaking of the code was kept secret in order to not alert the Germans. 
In this way the English were able to thwart some of the German plans. However, some of their plans were allowed to go ahead. 
This meant that some Allied lives were lost because to alter their own plans would have made the Germans realise their Enigma machine had been compromised.
Certainly, the code was broken at Bletchley Park but, credit could not be attributed during the war years, for secrecy purposes. Because of this Turing was not to become well known until after the war.
After the war he continued his work but, was excluded from government sponsored work due to his arrest for homosexual activity in Manchester which inexplicably he refused to deny.
He was found by his cleaner in his home in 1953. He was found to have poisoned himself with cyanide. A half-eaten apple was at his bedside, he was adjudged to have committed suicide. 
Suicide at this time was also a criminal offence but, other than “blackening” a person’s character, was a very difficult offence to prosecute.
The bottom line must be that he was an individual of prodigious intelligence who had the misfortune to have been born thirty years too soon.
Had he been born later he would certainly have been in the vanguard of both the computer age and the age of sexual enlightenment.
This would, probably, have resulted in a much happier life for him.