There are two petitions currently running to honour the memory of Alan Turing. The first is to feature Turing’s face on the back of the £10 note when it enters its next print cycle. (The article Turing on a Tenner outlines this story along with an image of what a Turing tenner could look like.) The second is to erect a statue of Turing on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. The fourth plinth, originally intended to hold an equestrian statue, was left empty for 150 years. In 1999 a succession of works from three contemporary artists were featured. From 2005 the Fourth Plinth Commission has commissioned artwork.

This is what the petition requests:

We ask HMG, through the GLA, to erect a statue to the London mathematician Alan Turing, on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Through his astonishing code breaking work at Bletchley Park, during the Second World War, he contributed as much as any person who survived to the defeat of Nazism and the shortening of the war. Alan Turing is considered to be the father of computer science, the father of artificial intelligence, and the father of mathematical biology, a record second-to-none in importance today.

HMG, and the GLA, should also consider including, or incorporating into this statue, a tribute to “Tommy” Flowers – another great Londoner and the engineer who designed and built, largely at his own expense, the Colossus machine which finally cracked the Lorenz code

Because of the nature of the Official Secrets Act, neither man could be truly recognized for their ground-breaking work in their life-time: a statue in Trafalgar Square would help redress that balance.

If you would like to see Alan Turing honoured on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, please click here to sign this petition.

(HMG = Her Majesty’s Government. GLA = Greater London Authority.)

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