The ESIT Mural: Three Ways to Imagine the Future
Why did the School want to put Turing, Tesla, and Lovelace on the same wall?
The mural that graces the entrance of the Higher School of Engineering and Technology at the University of La Laguna is not intended to be a decorative poster, but rather a declaration of intent: to bring together three figures who, from different disciplines and at different historical moments, dared to build a future that did not yet exist. They are not there for academic nostalgia, but as an aspirational mirror for those who enter each day to study engineering and technology.
Alan Turing, the man who defined what computing means; Nikola Tesla, the engineer who electrified the world; and Ada Lovelace, the first person to imagine that a machine could do more than calculate. Three portraits, one question: What remains to be invented?
There is also a deliberate interpretation in who they are: two men and a woman, and a story, Turing's, marked by the persecution he suffered because of his sexual orientation. The mural conveys a very simple idea: talent knows no gender or sexual orientation, and engineering—like life—loses when it treats either as an obstacle instead of what they are: irrelevant to what someone can ultimately build.
Alan Turing
Father of computing
| 1912 – 1954
“If a machine behaves as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent”
Nota: esta frase es una paráfrasis muy difundida no palabras textuales de Turing.
Nikola Tesla
Industrial Engineer and Inventor
| 1856 – 1943
“The future, which I truly worked for, is mine.”
Ada Lovelace
First Programmer
| 1815 – 1852
“Imagination is the faculty that discovers.”