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by OhNoMyqueen 1739 days ago
He's not oversold. His major feat (breaking enigma using a computer) is miscategorized into Computer Science, where it should be classified into Computer Engineering and Software Engineering, alongside other stars like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. His second major feat (the Turing Machine model) is one stone among the many foundational stones of Computer Science.
2 comments

Yes, "X oversold" is a poor choice of words for cases like Turing or Einstein.

The contributions of people like Turing and Einstein were as important as they are claimed to be, they are not oversold.

On the other hand, I am also very annoyed that the majority of people have some idea about the importance of Turing or Einstein, but they are completely unaware that there were many other contemporaneous scientists whose contributions were equally important and neither Turing nor Einstein nor any of their many peers could have created their own original work without using the work of the others.

These myths about the singular geniuses are reflected in the stupid laws about the so-called "intellectual property".

There exists no new "intellectual property" that does not incorporate 99% of old "intellectual property", but this is not handled correctly in patent claims or in fair use conditions.

If the current laws about patents and copyrights would have been applied during the initial evolution of the electronics and computer industries, they would have never progressed to the level of today.

He's not oversold. His major feat (breaking enigma using a computer)

You’re overselling him right there. That wasn’t his feat, he was just on the team (and after Enigma had been initially broken).