Here's Vapnik's story, I first forgot where it was from, then I remembered:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

quote:

Now, the history lesson, all this stuff feels fairly new.

It feels like it's younger than you are.

Here's the history of it.

Vapnik immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in about 1991.

Nobody ever heard of this stuff before he immigrated.

He actually had done this work on the basic support vector idea in his Ph.D. thesis at Moscow University in the early '60s.

But it wasn't possible for him to do anything with it, because they didn't have any computers they could try anything out with.

So he spent the next 25 years at some oncology institute in the Soviet Union doing applications.

Somebody from Bell Labs discovers him, invites him over to the United States where, subsequently, he decides to immigrate.

In 1992, or thereabouts, Vapnik submits three papers to NIPS, the Neural Information Processing Systems journal.

All of them were rejected.

He's still sore about it, but it's motivating.

So around 1992, 1993, Bell Labs was interested in hand-written character recognition and in neural nets.

Vapnik thinks that neural nets-- what would be a good word to use?

I can think of the vernacular, but he thinks that they're not very good.

So he bets a colleague a good dinner that support vector machines will eventually do better at handwriting recognition then neural nets.

And it's a dinner bet, right?

It's not that big of deal.

But as Napoleon said, it's amazing what a soldier will do for a bit of ribbon.

So that makes colleague, who's working on this problem with handwritten recognition, decides to try a support vector machine with a kernel, in which n equals 2, just slightly nonlinear, works like a charm.

Was this the first time anybody tried a kernel?

Vapnik actually had the idea in his thesis but never though it was very important.

As soon as it was shown to work in the early '90s on the problem handwriting recognition, Vapnik resuscitated the idea of the kernel, began to develop it, and became an essential part of the whole approach of using support vector machines.

So the main point about this is that it was 30 years in between the concept and anybody ever hearing about it.

It was 30 years between Vapnik's understanding of kernels and his appreciation of their importance.

And that's the way things often go, great ideas followed by long periods of nothing happening, followed by an epiphanous moment when the original idea seemed to have great power with just a little bit of a twist.

And then, the world never looks back.

And Vapnik, who nobody ever heard of until the early '90s, becomes famous for something that everybody knows about today who does machine learning.