So this is what Alan Turing’s statue looks like right now:

Alan Turing's Statue with lots of flowers

Each bunch of flowers (I expect there will be more later) was pledged by one of (where a company or university is listed this should be read as staff/students/alumni/hangers-on from company or university, rather than any endorsement from the place itself – this is very definitely a grassroots thing):

  • Aberdeen University x2
  • Andy Longhurst
  • Auckland Bioengineering Institute
  • Audionary special projects
  • Coventry Universit y * CrankyFlamingo (Reddit)
  • Edge Hill University x2
  • Exeter Univeristy
  • Goldsmiths, University of London
  • Harvard University
  • Heriot-Watt University
  • IT University of Copenhagen
  • Lancaster University
  • Leeds University
  • Loughborough University
  • Martin & Linda Sach
  • Newcastle University
  • Radboud University Nijmegen
  • Spies-Sabin Family
  • Technical University of Denmark
  • United states of Awesome (think this is made up)
  • Univeristy of Iceland
  • University of Bristol Staff
  • University of Bristol Students
  • University of California, Berkeley
  • University of Cambridge
  • University of Hertfordshire
  • University of New South Wales
  • University of Toronto x2
  • University of York

The state of the PayPal account is:

PayPal ballance of £518.60

…and I’m very very happy with that. Once the cost of the flowers is taken care off that will be about £450 for specialEffect, who thoroughly deserve it. I’ll put up the accounting post shortly (where we put up the recipes for flowers and the receipt from Special Effect so that it’s clear to everyone that all the money went to the right place) but right now I’m basking in the glow of a job well done. Really pleased that everyone came together on this one. Couple of lovely little quotes I’d like to share (both people gave their permission)

My girlfriend and I want to join in on a flower bunch for Turing. We’re two Icelanders getting our B.S. in computer science from the University of Iceland on the 21st, and we think this would be a great way to pay our respects to the founder of the field.

I got married on Alan’s 100th birthday so [my wife] (who did a degree in Physics) and I would like to support this.

For those of you keeping score we can tell you that:

  • Bristol wins with ‘Most bunches’ by a nose (Martin and Linda Sach arrived via a contact at Bristol), with Edge Hill, Aberdeen, and Toronto joint second with two.

  • Harvard wins with ‘largest amount donated overall’

  • Cambridge beats Oxford one-nil this year, although in fairness it was one-nil the other way last year….

I should thank Amanda McGrath, everyone who ever shared the link, and the wonderful staff at Venus flower shop in Manchester who coped admirably with me wandering in about an hour ago, was very impressed with them

One more quote from one of the pledges…(pledgers?)

Alan Turing's face as a table decoration at a wedding

I forgot to mention that when I got married two weeks ago (60 years after to the day that Alan passed away), that Alan Turing was the name of our top table – we used the names of British mathematicians, engineers, and scientists as our table names.

Accounting

For transparency reasons, I’m now doing to dumpertruck lots of accounting information into the article. Bear with me.

So first of all, here is the income for the project:

List of paypal transactions List of paypal transactions

Which adds up nicely to:

PayPal balance of £532.69

I now have to take away the cost of the flowers (some from Sainsbury’s and some from the florists called ‘Venus’ nearby, who were good enough to sort flowers for £3 a bunch rather than the £4 we’d budgeted, and who cheerfully took me in their green-fingered stride):

Receipt for flowers Receipt for flowers

Which leaves £436.69 pounds to be donated to Special Effect:

Donation of £436.69 to Special Effect