Turing as a Runner (1999)

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Turing_running.html

by benbreen • 7 years ago

72 10 7 years ago

www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk

z-tech• 7 years ago

Can anyone comment on the credibility of this article?

ludicast• 7 years ago

Pretty sure Turing was a tremendous runner so seems a true reflection of that at least.

bo1024• 7 years ago

It's definitely correct and I have seen this info multiple places, but I don't have a second source at hand.

jdietrich• 7 years ago

https://www.turing.org.uk/book/update/part6.html

leoc• 7 years ago

It’s reproduced as part of the MacTutor site so it’s likely to be accurate. Runner's World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runner%27s_World is also a fairly long-standing magazine.

alangpierce• 7 years ago

His time was 2 hours 46.03 minutes which by modern marathon times does not look so great but was good at that time.

This made me laugh a little. I guess at the Olympic level it "does not look so great", but that's a fantastic time: in the last SF marathon he would have gotten 20th place out of 5000. I had no idea he was such a good runner.

js2• 7 years ago

Runners are both much faster and much slower today. That time would get you into wave 1 corral 1 at Boston this year along with 999 other runners (just barely). And obviously the world record marathon time has dropped dramatically.

At the same time, there are a lot more runners today and most of them are a lot slower than in the 1980s running boom. You can look at winning times in almost any local race between the 80s and today and those 80s runners would easily trounce today's winners.

So Turing could probably win strategically picked small local marathons here and there, but at Boston he would've done better in his time than today.

dmckeon• 7 years ago

There were only 193 entrants at Boston in 1948, with a winning time of 2:31, and the entrants count did not break 1000 until 1968 with 1014.

EliRivers• 7 years ago

Related history; a great many mathematicians who intended to sit the Tripos at Cambridge (as Turing did) took up athleticism as part of their preparation. The exams were intended to be a grueling test of endurance as well as pure mathematical ability; the high scorers made physical fitness part of their preparations.

Back in the 1820s, eight days of examinations, five and a half hours a day, roughly 25% "pass rate" (i.e. 25% achieved wrangler status).

w8rbt• 7 years ago

I wonder if he took up walking after the injury? A lot of people I know who used to run walk now instead.

Turing as a Runner (1999)

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