Today is the 2^6-th anniversary of Turing's death. Although most of us know him for his work in computability and decryption, he also did some very interesting work in linear algebra. I looked him up in Wikipedia, and they talk about his work with LU decomposition. From what I can Google, Turing didn't invent LU decomposition, and probably heard about it from Von Neumann. What Turing did do was generalize LU for rectangular matrices, and provide error analyses. But wait, I think there's more! I recall reading a paper or hearing a lecture about Turing & matrices in which Turing inadvertently got two matrix factors *backwards*, and the algorithm not only worked -- it worked better! This example showed the cleverness of Turing to push forward when a linear algebra "expert" would never have proceeded due to the obvious mistake. Unfortunately, after Googling for an hour or so, I can't find the reference. I think I must have read the paper or heard the lecture in 2012, the 100'th anniversary of Turing's birth.