Alan Turing, not Jagadish Chandra Bose, to appear on £50 note

Recently some local news outlets have been publishing reports which said, scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose's visage, along with the queen's, will appear on new £50 notes in England.

In reality, they are misrepresenting a news published by the India Times. 

The Bank of England (BoE) made an announcement about launching new £50 note in October last year. Since then the bank has received a total of 227,299 nominations from the public. 

They published a list of 989 eligible names that were suggested within the nomination period. Sir JC Bose's name was in that primary list.

In July 2019, Banknote Character Advisory Committee announced that Alan Turing will feature on the note.

According to the official rules of the selection process, a person is deemed eligible for the £50 notes simply if the character was real, deceased and has contributed to the field of science in the United Kingdom (UK) in any way. 

BoE runs focus groups to help identify which characters on the longlist would resonate strongly with people, and which might cause concern. 

The committee then prepares a final shortlist based on the focus group feedback and detailed historical research on each of the characters. The final decision about who will appear on the next banknote is made by the Governor.

The new £50 note is expected to be in circulation by the end of 2021. It will be UK's first £50 note printed on polymer.

Who was Alan Turing? 

Alan Turing provided the theoretical underpinnings for the modern computer. He is best known for devising code-breaking machines during World War II.

Turing played a pivotal role in the development of early computers first at the National Physical Laboratory and later at the University of Manchester. He set the foundations for work on artificial intelligence by considering the question of whether machines could think. 

Turing, a homosexual, was convicted of gross indecency for his relationship with a man, but he was posthumously pardoned by the Queen. His legacy continues to have an impact on both science and society today.

The shortlist

The Banknote Character Advisory Committee, with the help of public focus groups, created a shortlist of 12 characters:

Mary Anning (1799-1847) – a self-taught palaeontologist known around the world for the fossil discoveries she made in her hometown of Lyme Regis.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984) – whose research revolutionised our understanding of the universe's smallest matter.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) – who drove the discovery of DNA's structure, a critical breakthrough in our understanding of the biology of life.

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) – who made outstanding contributions to our understanding of gravity, space and time.

William (1738-1822) and Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) – a brother and sister astronomy team devoted to uncovering the secrets of the universe.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) – whose research using x-ray crystallography delivered ground-breaking discoveries which shaped modern science and helped save lives.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) – visionaries who imagined the computer age.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) – who made discoveries which laid the foundations for technological innovations which have transformed our way of life.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) – whose incredible talent for numbers helped transform modern mathematics.

Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) – who uncovered the properties of radiation, revealed the secrets of the atom and laid the foundations for nuclear physics.

Frederick Sanger (1918-2013) – whose pioneering research laid the foundations for our understanding of genetics.

Alan Turing (1912-1954) – whose work on early computers, code-breaking achievements and visionary ideas about machine intelligence made him one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.