Comment by dang 9 days ago
[stub for offtopicness]
Side remark: "Please don't take the bait" is a good analogue to "please don't feed the trolls".
We've taken the bait out of the title now, but when a thread has already filled up with comments reacting to it, rather than anything interesting, that's bad for HN threads.
Forgotten not in the sense of lost knowledge, but more that the individual is not known proportionally to the importance of his work, or perhaps consistently when compared to his peers.
While specialists in his field know his work and his name (but not even everyone in software does), the public do not.
While your parents and friends see the dramatised exploits of Turing in films like The Imitation Game, or his face on the currency, the same is not said for Church.
Every field has it's public heroes, usually related to the stature of their work - Fleming and Jenner, Marconi, Ford, Bell. Turing.
Anyone will at least recognise these names, but not so for Church.
Ok, and if I asked a random member of the public for the name of a mathematician (excepting Turing, for clarity) what name do you think they would come up with? Pythagoras? Euler? Erdős?
I think the reality is that only a very small number of scientists, mathematicians, and similar are household names.
People's conception of Turing is massively skewed by the ending. His persona is now defined by his sexuality and treatment more than his contributions to maths and computer science. Andrew Hodges book is great. I had the fortune to go to his author tour the year it came out, he was doing the compsci departments of the UK and it was a really nice seminar.
Benedic Cumbersome was a good actor, but it's important to remember Michelangelo actually didn't look like Kirk Douglas.
Right - For every Newton, who (rightly) gets credit for his immense contributions, there are people like Euler, who are relatively unknown outside the field in spite of significant contributions[1].
[1] Massive in the case of Euler obviously.
Agreed - what I tried to highlight through a series about people that have contributed significantly, but are not so well known outside of the fields they impacted, there is always cooperation to a large extent and others involved - rarely a lone individual as the Turing movie and much of the press in the UK likes to portray. And many people, who should be known, get lost in the complexity of history. It's worth bringing the attention of this to a wider audience - people are genuinely inquisitive. Plus as another example, on an intro course to AI 45 out of 52 bachelor students had never heard of Church!
Isn't that just because they haven't made a blockbuster feature film about him yet?
Oh so maybe 0.01% of the population will even recognize his name
Dammit! Did I forget to forget him? Seems pretty memorable to me, and I'm just a regular dev.
The main theme of the essay is his work which helped the foundation of AI, In their book Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach (Third Edition), Russell and Norvig give limited (cursory) commentary about A. Church, but Turing gets the foundational credites, I think that is an oversight - and this book has sold in the hundreds of thousands and is used on AI courses extensively!
The point is about a wider audience - I believe it is good to highlight people that have contributed significantly, yet overlooked by society at large - agreed about the CS sector, but then again on my intro to AI course less than 7% of bachelor students have heard of him in this context!
"Forgotten" in the sense that everyone who knows anything about CS knows who he is because of the Church-Turing hypothesis, Church numerals, lambda calculus etc, and anyone who reads "On Computable Numbers" (only the most famous paper in all of computer science) knows that Turing actually quotes and credits Church and his work in that paper.
Here's a link to "On Computable Numbers" for easy reference for anyone who wants to read it/read it again. It's a cracker https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf