[pantulis]

There are a lot of true facts thrown in the article, but it does not explore the reason why this is.

I feel the era of great thinkers who single handledly performed disruptive breakthroughs in their field, the Galileos and Newtons, was over with the Einstein-era (and even Einstein also stood in the shoulders of giants).

No one works in isolation any more, and that is not a bad thing. You can subject any relevant figure to a similar analysis and come with the same results, it's absurd to try and come up with someone with such an overwhelming figure like Albert Einstein these days.

But if you need to choose a Founding Father of Computing Science for the general public, I'd say Alan Turing is the best candidate. Scholars will give due credit to Church, Zuse, von Neumann and all the others.

[yann2]

No one worked in isolation in the past either.

Move Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein 10kms away from where they were born, surround them by a different set of chimps and the story doesnt end the same way.

A good book from Niall Ferguson - the Sqaure and the Tower - makes the case tradionally Historians have studied individuals instead of groups because its easier to collect data on one chimp versus the entire troupe.

[cxr]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

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[mushishi]

Yup, the influences on e.g. Newton happening to delve into reading up on Archimedes, Descartes, Fermat, and then synthesizing their inventions in his mind with lot of time on his hand, or for that matter Leibniz getting math tutoring from Christiaan Huygens seem to be crucial in relation to the invention of fluxions/infinitesimals. (Approximately from memory of reading Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz).

Doesn't diminish their achievement in my mind.

[vmilner]

Having lived both 10kms north and 10kms south of Newton's birthplace (in more flat Lincolnshire farmland) I'm not sure he's the best example for that argument!

[denton-scratch]

The idea that history is wrong to focus on "chaps" derives from marxism; and Fergusson is very much anti-marxist. The marxian view would be that historical change is the result of economic forces; that if (e.g.) Turing hadn't done it someone else would have, because economics was driving history in that direction.

I'm sympathetic to the marxian view of Great Men; I think it's no coincidence that the related work of Godel and Turing was published within a couple of decades of one-another, or that the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo emerged around the same time as one-another.

I'm certainly impressed by the greatness of Great Men; but I'm hard-pressed to find one whose discoveries were so remarkable, in the context of their times, that noone else could have been expected to make similar discoveries around the same time.

[cxr]

Alternative angle: among their insights and discoveries, the successes will be shaped by survivorship bias. When deciding what part of one's work to focus on, a person will pursue the things that are close enough to other contemporary work at the time, because it provides a short path to buy-in.

[tialaramex]

Turing was interested in a bunch of other stuff, but what people know about is the Computer and his war work (at Bletchley Park). His work on say Morphogenesis (why are zebra stripes different on each animal?) is little known.

But Turing probably isn't more important to how you get from the Treaty of Bern in 1874 (creating the UPU thus you could now practically write letters in Paris and send them to New York and it Just Works™ albeit it's expensive and slow) to the Internet than, say, Godel (more fundamental observations about the nature of mathematics that underpin computation) or Grace Hopper (the first compiler although today we'd say this is only a linker). Her Navy bosses couldn't immediately see any value for it. But Grace is apparently the first to make use of the meta-applicability of computing - the minutiae of actually programming the computer are tiresome, a lot of rote tasks perfectly suited to a machine, so, why not have the computer do those parts for you?

[chubot]

Tangential, but one thing I learned from dense computer history book The Dream Machine is that the term "von Neumann architecture" is improperly assigning credit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report. And his name was on the report which made people think that he came up with the idea, which was false. It also resulted in a patent dispute -- it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the concept had been patented. The book goes into detail on this.

The wikipedia article also talks about Turing machines as a precedent that store data and code in the same place. But ironically I'd say that probably gives him too much credit! I think a large share should go to the people who designed a working machine, because it's easy to say come up with the idea of an airplane; much harder to make it work :) And to me it seems unlikely that the Turing Machine, which was an idea created to prove mathematical facts, was a major inspiration for the design of the ENIAC.

Finally, even though the author of this web page has his own credit dispute, I appreciate this elaboration on the credit assigned to Turing.

[jecel]

> von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report.

Actually, it was a study group to come up with the successor to ENIAC (called EDVAC) which included Eckert, Mauchly, von Neumann, Goldstine and Burks. Von Neumann was the last to join, but wrote down the group's conclusions in a memo meant for the group. Herman Goldstine typed that up into a nice report but listed von Neumann as the sole author and distributed 24 copies to researchers. Many new copies of the report were made and circulated causing confusion about who had created the ideas.

George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral", on the other hand, argues that von Neumann's close relationship with Gödel had a major role in getting the stored program idea adopted by the EDVAC group.

[pvg]

even Einstein also stood in the shoulders of giants

People have had that perched-on-giants feeling for some time:

This concept has been traced to the 12th century, attributed to Bernard of Chartres. Its most familiar expression in English is by Isaac Newton in 1675: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

[OrderlyTiamat]

I've heard this quote explained as an insult directed to one of Newtons enemies (either Leibiz or Hooke), referencing their short height. I'm not convinced it's true, but it is an amusing possibility.

[agumonkey]

Note that this might be a double meaning jab at hook. Sadly brilliant if true

[kreetx]

This is just a theory, but I think this (assigning some major leap of science to few specific persons) is how society remembers things. I.e it is difficult, or even impossible, to go into the intricate histories of how things actually developed in middle or high school (and perhaps even in college), thus the people teaching us simplify it to make it easier to study and remember.

Once you start digging you realize that nothing is as simple. For example for physics, "Physics for Poets" by Robert H. March is an eye opener.

[netcan]

A typical medieval depiction of a great siege might be one king and two or three famous knights with a ladder assaulting a 5 foot castle manned by another king and a knight. Distilling stories to a handful of characters seems to make it easier for us to digest. I suppose it's easier for us to imagine ourselves as one of these people.

[OskarS]

> But if you need to choose a Founding Father of Computing Science for the general public, I'd say Alan Turing is the best candidate. Scholars will give due credit to Church, Zuse, von Neumann and all the others.

I agree with this. It's certainly the case that I wish more people knew of Alonso Church and Kurt Gödel, but you have to realize in a "PR" sense that it's simply not going to be feasible to teach the general public about their contributions.

And Turing's contributions were genuinely ground-breaking, there's a reason that computer science is lousy with concepts named after or by him (Turing machines, Turing-completeness, even the word "computing" was arguably coined in "On Computable Numbers"). He also thought deeply and hard about the philosophical implications to computing in a way that others didn't (the "Turing test" being the obvious example).

In addition: when a mathematically inclined person describes any kind of mathematical concept to laymen, the first question is always "Yeah, but what is that actually useful for?", asked with a certain amount of disdain. With Turing, the answer is powerful: "How about defeating the Nazis and laying the foundation for modern society?". That case is harder to make for Church or Gödel: they obviously didn't work for the GCSE, and "lambda calculus" as a concept is a much more abstract thing than Turing machines, which laymen can readily understand (i.e. it's "just" a computer).

Add to that the fact that Turing's story is not just about computing, or code-breaking, it's also the story of the suffering that society inflicted on gay men. The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the more reason to celebrate him now.

I agree with the basic point of the article, but I have no issue with giving Alan Turing this title. He earned it.

[thanatos519]

Very much agreed about thinking deeply and having earned the title!

He applied computational thinking all over the place, showing great foresight in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern

[legostormtroopr]

> The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the more reason to celebrate him now.

Please don’t diminish his legacy by repeating this lie. Turings suicide is contentious and circumstantial at best. His documented behaviour had none of the very common signs of suicide - there was no note, he had plans for later in the week, and none of his close friends noted any change in behaviour.

[UncleMeat]

Suicide or not, his treatment by society was equally heinous and repulsive. Even he had lived a complete and happy life, his story would have been a bright example of the terror and evil of homophobia.

[donkeybeer]

Everything builds on past work. Educated people, at least in europe, were quite well connected and aware of each others works in those times too.

[hoseja]

Because those others mostly aren't anglos helping the war effort.

[colechristensen]

Nobody exists in a vacuum, but I think Kuhn was right: scientific progress is made up of long periods of incremental work split between short bursts of paradigm shifts. Those shifts are more likely to rest on a few very influential people who take the current state and look at it in a considerably different way. We haven’t had that in physics in quite a long time and might not again.

[elzbardico]

The problem is that the general public thinks the CS == Computers.

So, Founding Fathers of computing science becomes mixed - starting from those low brow thinkers we call journalists - with the idea of Founding Father of computing. And this is not only unfair, but technically wrong.

[erhk]

Disruption is a canary word to me now.