The new £50 bearing the face of LGBTQ icon and and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing has been revealed by the Bank of England.
The Treasury note, which is the last British banknote to make the transition from paper to polymer, will enter circulation on 23 June this year, on what would have been the mathematician’s birthday.
The design, which was unveiled in a virtual ceremony Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey on Thursday morning (25 March), uses a famous 1951 portrait of Turing by Elliott & Fry, which is part of the Photographs Collection at the National Portrait Gallery.
Other design features include a table and mathematical formulae from Turing’s seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, which is widely considered to be the foundation of modern computer science.
The £50 note also depicts a ticker tape featuring Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code. The concept of a machine fed by binary tape featured in the Turing’s 1936 paper.