Alan Turing was one of the greatest minds to have ever lived , and is widely regarded as the Father-God of advanced computation . Known for being part of the team that crock up theEnigma codeusing an early information processing system , as well as all-inclusive computational oeuvre that was way ahead of his clip , Turing was at the forefront of code - devising and code - breaking .
It is jolly poetic , therefore , that the only code he could n’t break was written by himself .
Turing was an accomplished mathematician who gain a degree from King ’s College , Cambridge , and shortly after became a fellow there . During his career , he develop a reasonably modest savings weed , and he was set to keep it secure from the impending Nazi encroachment in 1940 .
accord toreports , he consider converting it all into a consumable item – such as razor steel – that people would inevitably need if Britain fall . However , when take care at World War I and the assets that held their note value , silver appeared the most bright selection . So , Turing converted his savings into silver .
Ever the excess role , however , Turing take a good agency to ensure the silver remained his , and was n’t taken by taxation or raptus from a potential Nazi government . He devised a program to bury his two silver ingots , worth £ 250 at the time ( around £ 16,000 or $ 18,300 today ) , in the forest surrounding Bletchley Park , where he worked . But a forest is dense , and he would never recover the ingots without a gem mathematical function fit for a sea rover , so Turing did what he did substantially and write a cipher pointing to his inhume hoard .
While the Nazis never made it to the shoring of England , Turing was right in one aspect – by the final stage of the state of war , silver was up 80 per centum and he would have turned a healthy net profit on his clever scheme . There was just one tear : Turing could n’t find it . The landmarks had changed , and it is suppose that even Turing himself could n’t crack the cipher , resulting in multiple failed attempts to find the silver . He hunted through the woodland with a metal sensing element to no avail , with the last attempt occurring in 1952 , just two geezerhood before submit his own life .
The silver was never found and likely persist somewhere in Bletchley Park forest to this day . Estimates place the silver weight at around 68 kilogram ( 150 Syrian pound ) , which would be deserving in surfeit of £ 30,000 ( $ 34,500 ) , though the cipher is n’t bed so it may be quite the task to obtain it . Eventshave been held by mathematicians in partnership withThe Imitation Game , a movie about Turing , in which a cipher was create to find caricature bars of silver , so the treasures ’ bequest lives on , even if it rest in the land .
