555 thanks for the note about his new book,
I love charles petzold, he opened my eyes to the internals inside mother board else I’d have had less grades in digital logic class.
i agree w/ you on his patience in writing too. kudos for him
will it be on your recommended reading list as well?
Hi Jeff, the fruit in the first book of the bible is not (at least imperatively) an apple. It just mentions a fruit.
It also doesn’t symbolize forbidden love. The fruit itself gives the knowledge to differ between good and evil. It is forbidden for the adam and eve, but they eat from it. They don’t eat from it because of love, but because of curiosity and eagerness (the snake/devil promises them the power of god if they eat it). So the fruit symbolizes the rebelling of man agains god.
Anyway: great post, nice to see an homage for a computer pioneer from time to time in your blog.
The Poles broke the early Enigma - showing it could be done at all, but could not extend it to the more complex Enigma, Various people at Bletchley Park then extended this to the more complex variants of Enigma, Turing showed how to semi-automate this process and designed the Bombes that were electro-mechanical devices to do this …
He had a minor role in the design of Colossus - which broke the Lorenz Cypher (much more complex than Enigma) and was the first to realise it was a (near) universal computer (and program it to write (bad) poetry)
Tommy Flowers came up with the idea of a machine with a huge number of valves which would be reliable if never switched off (it’s the power surges that blow valves) and is always credited with the design (but knew nothing of the mathematics required and never designed another computer) Max Newman and his team actually designed the system
Babbage’s Analytical Engine was Turing Complete, was a Von Neumann machine, before either was born … it had software written for it (by Ada Lovelace, with bugs in it …) it influenced Vannavar Bush and the makers of the Harvard Mark I : Babbage died in poverty and only three people went to his funeral …
On giant German words: how about Schuetzengrabenvernichtungsautomobil, literally automobile for destruction of defensive trenches, commonly called a Tank.
On only the good mathematicians die young: Euler and Gauss are big exceptions to the examples you give. How many Euler’s theorem and Gauss’ theorem are there? Many. They both lived to ripe old age, and were fruitful all the way into the grave. I read (I think in Everything and More: A History of Infinity, a great book for anyone who suffered through a Real Analysis course in math) that Gauss actually was so fruitful that he held back mathematical progress for decades: he had so many results worked out that he would scoop other mathematicians. Often when someone published a new result he would point out that, in his notebooks, he had already proved the same theorem twenty years earlier. Very intimidating.
An interesting take on Turing is Janna Levin’s novel ‘A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines’ - http://www.jannalevin.com/books.html
It ties together Turing and Godel in a magical realist sort of way - but all the dialog is taken from their writings. It’s extensively footnoted, but I’d probably expect that from a novelist who’s also a PhD in physics from MIT.
It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed it immensely.
he had already proved the same theorem twenty years earlier…
This seems to be always true of mathematics? Physicists came to rely on wandering down to the Maths department and asking for a formula for their latest theory and getting directed to an esoteric work by a long dead mathematician, that they were surprised when String theory got ahead of the mathematicians (which is one of the reasons it is not fully worked out yet …)
Frank,
I don’t believe science should be related
in any way to nationality.
Here, nationality should be extended to culture. Western culture in Europe and North American fostered a foundation and environment for innovation. For example, Ramanujan, an Indian, flourished because of western culture and would have been irrelevant without it. How much innovation came out of Asia or Africa?
The real father of computer science is Charles Babbage.
I, for one, greatly respect mister Turing (Turing Machines was my favorite subject back at the university) . But I do vote of Edsger Dijkstra as the greatest pioneer in computer science.
Although Turing did work on breaking the Enigma machine, it was Polish mathematicians who actually broke it (Marian Rejewski, Jerzy R#380;ycki and Henryk Zygalski). Only because Brits were managing the project do they get all the glory.
Thanks Jeff, that was a beautiful post.
I sometimes wonder why some genius leave so soon… If Ramanujan hadn’t died at age 33, who knows what kind of revolutionary theory he would have found. Abel received the equivalent of a math nobel prize a year after he died at age 29. Celcius died at 42. Galois (math. topology - cryptography) also lived 29 years and nearly ended in prison. Carnot (thermodynamics) died at 36. Hertz (waves) at 36. Pascal (most math. theorems) at 39. They all leave in a dramatic or poetic way, creating legends and dreams as to what they would have become.
Jakub Konecki, I don’t believe science should be related in any way to nationality.
There’s a lot of (fictional) Turing in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.
Sad story, truly, for such a brilliant mind.
As a German I would like to comment that there’s nothing scary about the work Entscheidungsproblem. It’s no more complex than, say, Fahrvergnuegen and doesn’t even have an Umlaut. In some ways the German version is more readily parsed than decision problem which throws in semantically superfluous whitespace. I would settle for EntscheidungsProblem but not entscheidungs_problem since German uses captitalization for nouns.
@ Chris,For
example, Ramanujan, an Indian, flourished because of western culture and would have been irrelevant without it. How much innovation came out of Asia or Africa?
Wow! You either went to a really bad school, or you are not very curious, or you get all your information … well, talking to very badly informed people.
Granted, culture [ namely Western culture ] influences science and the science that we know now is very much Western Science and that Western culture and science was instrumental to Ramanujan’s development as a mathematician. However, I have to ask how much history of science and mathematics do you know? Well, I guess it is clear.
China is in Asia. Binary number system came from china. The fact that Gottfried Leibniz makes use of it is only because he read the I Ching.
India is in china. Who do you think came up with the idea of Zero?
Egypt is in Africa. Did you not ever come across anything that came out of Egypt. You know that obscure little city called Alexandria with its obscure little Library?
And, I end with a WOW! I had heard bad things about public schools, but by God … wait, I went to public shools too.
Thanks for bringing up the memory of Turing. I think of his contributions every time I take a cup of coffee, seeing as the 1 year membership anniversary gift from ACM was a Alan Turing cup.
Cheers Alan, may you now have found the compassion and tolerance that you never enjoyed in life.
As it was written above Poles had broken Enigma code long before 2nd World War began (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine).
In the 1939, just before the war, they shared, they new allies, everything French and Britons.
During the war Britons had to read huge number of German messages. Britons just made better and faster machines based on original Polish machine called Cryptologic bomb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)).
Of course, Alan Turing was genius and it’s nice they played on the same side with Poles.
Enigma was broken first by the Polish and this gave the British cryptographers the start they needed, but when the Poles gave their research to the British the Germans had increased the complexity of Enigma and the Poles methods no longer broke it… Alan turnings breakthrough was automating the decryption… and working on Colossus that was use the break the more secure German code systems (not Enigma)
Charles Babbage designed (but was never given funding to finish building) the first Turing Complete computer … the Analytical Engine, he also broke the Vigenre cypher, then thought to be unbreakable …
@Patrick. No matter how much we disagree with a law, we don’t have the right to break them.
If we took that ignorant comment seriously, women may not have been given the vote, apartheid could still be enforced. I suggest you actually read a book about civil disobedience to understand how laws change in the face of protest.
To be consistent you’d also have to condemn the law-breaking of Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and Pankhurst. Such a position is clearly ridiculous, because these people all helped the world become a better place.
Coldly suggesting Turing should some how become a social protestor, without any of the relevant skills or aptitude, is a simplistic, almost childish, view of what was possible for Turing in 1950’s Britain.
Instead, we’re left with a great scientist that killed himself. Have you actually considered that his action was so extreme and poignant, that it changed minds? Don’t you realise that intelligent people looking at the case decided the law needed changing - which indeed it did.
Thank you Jeff, for bringing my attention to another interesting book.
How fitting and ironic at the same time; my ACM anniversary mug arrived today with a picture of Turing. Next to his picture was,
Computing Pioneer:
Not too shabby.