Apology petition for defamed UK mathematician Alan Turing gathers pace
01 Sep 2009
Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition seeking a posthumous apology to mathematician Alan Turing, considered the father of modern computing.
Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for having homosexual relations.
Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code breaking centre during world war II and and made significant contributions towards cracking Germany's much vaunted top secret Enigma war codes during WWII.
He was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century for his contribution towards modern computing. According to the magazine, many of the applications that people for in computing that have their origin in the Turing machine.
Though Turing's sterling contributions span a number of fields, he is perhaps best known for his code-breaking work during world war II. Turing created the Bombe, an electromechanical device that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines, which is credited with hastening the end if WWII.
He also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing and in 1936 established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the emergence of computing in a seminal paper titled 'On Computable Numbers'. Later, in 1950 he developed a test to measure the intelligence of a machine, which is known after him as the Turing Test.