| This is... somewhat untethered from reality? Of course there's a link between mathematics and computing, and it well predates Turing or Berkeley. Starting somewhere with Leibniz' "stepped reckoner", stumbling further along with Babbage, Lovelace, and the many actuarial computers. And that link was very obvious by the time Hilbert & Ackerman formulated the Entscheidungsproblem. Turings biggest contribution to computing was two-fold: One, he created a formal (theoretical) machine that had behavior equivalent to first-order logic.
Second, he formally proved that equivalence - probably the most important part here. That formally proven equivalence means that all problems decidable by first-order logic are decidable by a machine.
Three, he used that to formally prove the Entscheidungsproblem isn't generally solvable, and so proved the limits of first order logic. That's the fundamental breakthrough. Proving that a machine can solve an entire class of problems, and that there are limits to what that machine can solve. It's not that he somehow shaped what computers should look like, but that he had formally proven their capabilities and limitations. I'm not surprised by the article given the background of the author - if you value practicality over theory (i.e. you favor software engineering over computer science), Aiken and Berkeley are more relevant. But the ACM has always cared about a theoretical foundation, and so their admiration of Turing makes sense. The fact that the author doesn't bother to even acknowledge that distinction is a bit surprising, though. |
I find it interesting that Gentzen was not convinced by Church's assertion that the lambda calculus demonstrated effectively calculable functions; however when Gentzen saw that Turning explanation he was finally convinced.
Based on this I'd say that computing has 3 fathers, alternately, a holy trinity :-)
[0] https://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~acm/turing-phd.pdf