Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous¹ government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.

成千上万人签署了一项唐宁街请愿书，要求政府对于二战时期的密码破译专家Alan Turing给予正式致歉。

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Alan Turing is said to be the founder of computer science

Writer Ian McEwan has just backed the campaign, which already has the support of scientist Richard Dawkins.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted³ under the gross（总共的，未打折扣的） indecency（无理，猥亵） act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

The petition（请愿，请求） was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming.

He is seeking an apology for the way the young mathematician⁴ was treated after his conviction. He has also written to the Queen to ask for a posthumous knighthood to be awarded to the British mathematician.

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration（去势，削正） as a "treatment" and his security privileges（特权） were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

"This added insult and humiliation⁵ ultimately drove him to suicide," said gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who also backs the campaign. "With Turing's death, Britain and the world lost one of its finest intellectual minds. A government apology and posthumous（死后的） pardon are long overdue（过期的，未兑的）."

National legacy⁶

Alan Turing is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping⁷ to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered（译成密码） with the German Enigma⁸ machines.

However he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing⁹.

In 1936 he established the conceptual and philosophical¹⁰ basis for the rise of computers in a seminal¹¹（精液的，生殖的） paper called "On Computable¹² Numbers", whilst in 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Today it is known as the Turing Test.

After the war he worked at many institutions including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers.

There is a memorial statue of him in Manchester's Sackville Gardens which was unveiled in 2001.

"I kept reading about potential funding cuts at Bletchley Park and I suddenly felt really mad about it," said Mr Graham-Cumming.

"I felt Turing was getting overlooked as being a British genius and that there was a blindspot（盲点） in the public eye about an important man."

He has so far collected more than 5,500 signatures.

He admits that an official apology to Alan Turing is "unlikely", as Mr Turing has no known surviving family, but he says that the real aim of the petition is symbolic¹³.

"The most important thing to me is that people hear about Alan Turing and realise his incredible impact on the modern world, and how terrible the impact of prejudice was on him," he said.