Which is something we ought to do - i.e change our understanding of history - in light of new evidence and evolving moral sentiment, no? I don't see anything wrong about this.
I really enjoy the “Overlooked” series of obits [0]. It’s interesting for some of them to go back and see who the NYT printed obits for on the day/week of the death. It’s not as if the sections are full of even more famous (if not accomplished) persons — on an average day, it seems that there were plenty of obits for people who were just relatively well-known in high society. Such that if the NYT had a better focus on science back then, a few of the overlooked women would have gotten at least a brief (though not the many who were overlooked or ignored by their own field at the time.)
I think Turing is probably the most famous in his own time to have been in “Overlooked”. Charlotte Bronte also has been featured but she died in the 19th century.
> I think Turing is probably the most famous in his own time to have been in “Overlooked”.
Although many on HN have probably never heard of her, I would argue Fannie Farmer was just about as famous as a woman could be in her time. Not only was she the Martha Stewart media mogul of the early 1900's but she was one of the early pioneers of modern nutrition science. She was so well respected in the field that she was invited to teach a course at Harvard Medical School decades before women would even be permitted to enroll.
She's also the reason we all have measuring spoons and cups in our kitchens.
Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. The top cryptographer of WWII was William Friedman, who turned cryptanalysis from guessing to machine-powered statistical crunching. The first programmable computer was built by Konrad Zuse.
Few people know any of those names today. Zuse should be remembered more. He had the right idea, and built a working machine, but it was destroyed by bombs during WWII.
In the 1990s, I had to go through considerable lengths to obtain a physical copy of his book describing his "Plankalkül" programming language; nowadays it's conveniently available online.
Your history is inconsistent. Turing's homosexuality became public knowledge shortly before his death, which was also before anyone started writing the history of computing.
I don't think he's primarily remembered for his work on cryptanalysis. I think he's primarily remembered for the Turing test, followed by the Turing machine model, followed by his work on morphogenesis. That's just my opinion as a working mathematician.
Turing machines and Turing incompleteness are utterly fundamental to computer science theory. He is rightly up there with Church and Godel for kicking off a proper analysis of what computers can and cannot do. (And then of course the Turing test was kind of a second version of that from the AI perspective.)
There are other plenty of people overlooked for WWII contributions due to secrecy, and I was disappointed by how much the NYTimes article focused specifically on that aspect of Turing's work and deemphasized the rest, but it's just flat out false that Turing would be a minor figure in computing history if not for his sexual orientation.
I think if you changed your first sentence to simply "Turing should be a minor figure in computing history compared to his contemporaries" it would still be controversial but your comment would not be so grey. As it currently stands it just comes off as homophobic. As an aside I spent a lot of time sitting next to his statue in manchester on my lunch breaks and this was a long time before he became so homoiconic.
Much of Turing's work was classified as Official Secret until the mid 70s. Declassification allowed the the publication of The Ultra Secret that first revealed what went on at Bletchley. Two of Turing's papers on cryptanalysis were thought significant enough to remain classified by GCHQ for 70 years. Yet he was still fairly well known.
Obviously after the release of the wartime work his place in history grew.
It was only after that declassification of Bletchley that anyone heard of Tommy Flowers and his work at GPO research. Up til that point even his family didn't know his contribution. Flowers should be far better known than he is, but anyone encountering the Enigma codebreaking story in the last 40+ years should come across his story. I do think it criminal they got so little official recognition.
the Church-Turing thesis is the bedrock of computer science, without which it may not even be a science. It defines, scientifically and uniquely, what computing actually is, thus separating computer science from the other sciences and turning it into its own field. You can't possibly argue that this is a small contribution.
While the likes of Zuse and Flowers deserve more recognition, here are some other of Turing's achievements.
- Introduced the concept of ordinal logic, an apporach to overcoming the limitations of Goedel's incompleteness theorems, a thriving field as of 2019. See [1].
- Gave the definite analysis of the notion of "mechanical computability", see [2].
- Essentially invented the field of AI, with key contributions such as Neural Networks [3] (but see [4, 5, 9]) and the Turing test [6].
This is completely not true. I learned about Turing machines in the '80s, and that was as a kid reading basic programming books from the library. The Turing test has been commonplace in sci-fi for at least that long. The Turing Award has been around since the '60s.
What really gets me is that--as jgrahamc pointed out--you said this same thing two years ago, and were corrected in the same way. Which means you knew this was wrong, and you posted it anyway.
I can't comprehend being so troubled by the existence of historical gay people that you're willing to deliberately lie to discredit them.
I think calling Turing's achievements "minor" (versus, say, "overrated") is up for debate. But saying that "it became known that he was gay" underplays and distorts even just that part of his life, as if he were just a mediocrity until he played the game of sexual politics and became a media darling. He was convicted and chemically castrated by his own government and had his career (and travel) curtailed at the age of 40. Even with the high recognition that his name gets today, we should still wonder how much more he would have achieved and been recognized had he not become ostracized at the prime of his career.
" As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory." -- Nope, not quite true.
"They even taught Turing how to build electro-mechanical devices which simulated the workings of the Enigma machine and enabled operators to cycle through one possible setting after another."
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] threadI think Turing is probably the most famous in his own time to have been in “Overlooked”. Charlotte Bronte also has been featured but she died in the 19th century.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/overlooked
Although many on HN have probably never heard of her, I would argue Fannie Farmer was just about as famous as a woman could be in her time. Not only was she the Martha Stewart media mogul of the early 1900's but she was one of the early pioneers of modern nutrition science. She was so well respected in the field that she was invited to teach a course at Harvard Medical School decades before women would even be permitted to enroll.
She's also the reason we all have measuring spoons and cups in our kitchens.
Few people know any of those names today. Zuse should be remembered more. He had the right idea, and built a working machine, but it was destroyed by bombs during WWII.
Mostly they just say that his work was destroyed, and not much more, which is a shame! And then they devote hundreds of pages to his contemporaries.
I searched Amazon and apparently has an autobiography, which doesn't appear to be widely read:
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-My-Life-Konrad-Zuse/dp/35405...
In the 1990s, I had to go through considerable lengths to obtain a physical copy of his book describing his "Plankalkül" programming language; nowadays it's conveniently available online.
I don't think he's primarily remembered for his work on cryptanalysis. I think he's primarily remembered for the Turing test, followed by the Turing machine model, followed by his work on morphogenesis. That's just my opinion as a working mathematician.
There are other plenty of people overlooked for WWII contributions due to secrecy, and I was disappointed by how much the NYTimes article focused specifically on that aspect of Turing's work and deemphasized the rest, but it's just flat out false that Turing would be a minor figure in computing history if not for his sexual orientation.
> The ACM started giving the Turing Award in 1966.
Obviously after the release of the wartime work his place in history grew.
It was only after that declassification of Bletchley that anyone heard of Tommy Flowers and his work at GPO research. Up til that point even his family didn't know his contribution. Flowers should be far better known than he is, but anyone encountering the Enigma codebreaking story in the last 40+ years should come across his story. I do think it criminal they got so little official recognition.
- Introduced the concept of ordinal logic, an apporach to overcoming the limitations of Goedel's incompleteness theorems, a thriving field as of 2019. See [1].
- Gave the definite analysis of the notion of "mechanical computability", see [2].
- Essentially invented the field of AI, with key contributions such as Neural Networks [3] (but see [4, 5, 9]) and the Turing test [6].
- Work in chemistry / biology, see [7, 8].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_logic
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
[3] https://www.info2007.net/docs/intelligent-machinery-alan-tur...
[4] http://compucology.net/unorganized
[5] http://compucology.net/criticism
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
[7] http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing....
[8] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/alan-turings-contrib...
[9] http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20A...
What really gets me is that--as jgrahamc pointed out--you said this same thing two years ago, and were corrected in the same way. Which means you knew this was wrong, and you posted it anyway.
I can't comprehend being so troubled by the existence of historical gay people that you're willing to deliberately lie to discredit them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Ala...
I was fairly sure there was a roundabout in Manchester called the Turing roundabout...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/15/polish-codebr...
"They even taught Turing how to build electro-mechanical devices which simulated the workings of the Enigma machine and enabled operators to cycle through one possible setting after another."
He built a machine to speed up the solution.