History Memes

Well, we do a little exaggeration in memes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Career_and_research

Have a read of the above link. Obviously, he was part of a team and many people were involved but it's also pretty apparent that without him Enigma likely wouldn't have been cracked.

The myth of "great men" is usually bullshit but in this case that's not the case. He was an eccentric genius who advanced computing and cryptography massively. He did almost singlehandedly reduce the length of the war. Yes others were involved and also essential, but without Turing the war would very likely have been longer.

Due to the challenges answering questions concerning what an outcome would have been if a historical event did or did not occur (the realm of counterfactual history), it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war.[98] However, official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years. He added the caveat that this did not account for the use of the atomic bomb and other eventualities.[99]

It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.

• Peter Hilton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hilton

Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923[1] – 6 November 2010[2]) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II.[3]