Closed petition A Statue for Alan Turing

Closed on 22 February 2013

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.