Celebrated in Poetry and Free to Cerebrate

Clerihew - a biographical bit of fun that rhymes on the run. I like how this one fits into the flow of prose and contributes to the picture of the genius free to roam.

With the backing of John Maynard Keynes, he was elected a Fellow of King’s College in 1935, at the age of twenty-two. When the news reached his old school, the boys celebrated with a clerihew: “Turing / Must have been alluring / To get made a don / So early on.” With a stipend, no duties, and High Table dining privileges, he was free to follow his intellectual fancy. That spring, attending lectures in the foundations of mathematics, he was introduced to a deep and unresolved matter known as the “decision problem.” A few months later, during one of his habitual runs, he lay down in a meadow and conceived a sort of abstract machine that settled it in an unexpected way.

Jim Holt. "Code-Breaker: The life and death of Alan Turing" The New Yorker, February 6, 2006.

And so for day 1549
11.03.2011