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