Supposedly the "father of the digital age" would be 100 today were he alive. I've never understood all those ones and zeros. All I ever get from digital devices is the middle digit.

Don't know much about the digital age wither, but I try to do my bit.

You just took a byte outa my logic.

O!

What is probably more important, and less well-known, is that Turing is one of the "backroom" heroes of WW2, whose activities at Bletchley Park helped to ensure that all of Europe (and possibly the USA) is not now speaking German. http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

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What is probably more important, and less well-known, is that Turing is one of the "backroom" heroes of WW2, whose activities at Bletchley Park helped to ensure that all of Europe (and possibly the USA) is not now speaking German.

Important to us, but what do the Germans think?

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Originally posted by Richard English:
Bletchley Park

Important as it was, I can't help thinking that a name like that just had to have been dreamed up by someone like Rowan Adkinson.

There's an e-petition running to put Alan Turing on the reverse of the next issue of 10 pound bank notes. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31659

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Originally posted by Geoff:

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Originally posted by Richard English:
Bletchley Park

Important as it was, I can't help thinking that a name like that just had to have been dreamed up by someone like Rowan Adkinson.

It's not an especially strange name by British standards.

And it still exists - http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

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It's not an especially strange name by British standards.

But one of the few that's pronounced like it's spelled. Chumley, indeed.

While that site you linked to called Turing the "Founder of Computer Science," as with most discoveries and inventions, there were many involved with the development of computers, all the way back to 2700 BC.

I don't think the implication was that Turing invented the programmable computer (this acolade is generally given to Charles Babbage) but that Turing was the first to study computers and their applications as a separate science.

It's a bit like robotics. The term "robot" had been in existence since 1920, when the Czech author Karel Čapek used the term for mechanical men in his book "R.U.R.", which stood for stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. However, the study of robots and the name "robotics" to describe such study was invented by Isaac Asimov.

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Originally posted by Proofreader:

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It's not an especially strange name by British standards.

But one of the few that's pronounced like it's spelled. Chumley, indeed.

Certainly we do have some eccentric spellings (as does the USA) - but the overwhelming majority of places are pronounced as they are written.

Cholmondley, Belvoir and Leicester are well-known examples of the former; London, Liverpool and Manchester are well-known examples of the letter.

Speaking of under-rated geniuses: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Funny...but it makes a good point. There are very few discoveries/inventions by one person.

Stephen Fry recognises Tesla's work, and he even has a nerdgasm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ovD21KbSDM#t=9m50s

The claim that Tesla's contributions went unrecognized or were underrated by mainstream science is a bit of howler: the SI unit for magnetic field strength is the Tesla (T), putting him in the company of Newton, Kelvin, Watt, Hertz, Faraday, Pascal and Becquerel.

Also, Turing would have been remembered as just another one of the thousands of smart people who worked at Bletchley Park had it not been for his invention of the Turing Machine, a mechanism that could calculate any computable number or function. Alonzo Church had earlier come up with the Lambda Calculus, which was a small set of axiomatic functions that could be combined to calculate any computable number or function, but there was no obvious way to turn the Lambda Calculus into a machine. A Turing machine can actually be built (you can see one here), and the architecture of almost every CPU is based on it: the program counter is the read head, the squares are memory addresses, the symbols are bytes stored in the memory addresses, and the tape is the memory.

Turing's breathtaking insight was that this architecture wasn't just a souped-up adding machine, it was a universal machine that could do anything.

Interested readers can find Turing's original paper On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem here.

Thanks for those great links, Neveu. The YouTube was really interesting. You don't stop by often, but I love it when you do!

I found that Entscheidungsproblem means "decision problem." Why does the word have English and German?

Alonzo Church had earlier come up with the Lambda Calculus

And, we oughtn't to forget that Alonzo Church was Turing's PhD adviser at Princeton in the late '30s.

Thanks Z. I knew he had been at Princeton but didn't know Church was his advisor.
I forgot to add an obligatory word-related reference: the use of cumbrous on the first page of Turing's paper.

Not really obligitory in this thread, since it's only tangentially word-related!

Thanks for the great info! But despite the SI unit, the guy on the street knows Edison, and thinks he invented air, fire, earth, and water, and that Tesla is a car or a rock band.

I knew he had been at Princeton but didn't know Church was his advisor.

I found out when browsing the fantastic Mathematics Genealogy site (link).

Wow, that is a great site, z. I even found some Spectors there! Fascinating.

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Originally posted by Geoff:
the guy on the street knows Edison, and thinks he invented air, fire, earth, and water, and that Tesla is a car or a rock band.

Yeah, but the guy on the street doesn't know who Henry, Ohm, Sievert, Joule, Ampere, Weber, Celsius, or Coulomb are either.

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Originally posted by Geoff:
Speaking of under-rated geniuses: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

As it happens I have just been reading "The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century" by Robert Lomas, which makes all these points and more.

Edison, of course, was a supremely ruthless businessman most of whose inventions were actually the inventions of others (either those in his inventing team or those of outsiders like Tesla). Edison's genius was not that of invention but that of selling his ideas - many of which were not as good as others' ideas - DC current supply and cylinder phonographs to name but two.

Few people ever got the better of Edison who was happy to steal others' ideas, usually without compensating them. One of the few who got the better of him was the inventor of the incandescemnt light bulb, Joseph Swan, who saw Edison off in the courts.

But, even so, most people still believe that Edison invented the light bulb - even though Swan was selling his bulbs before Edison even had one that worked. The first public building in the world to be lit by incandescent light bulbs was the Savoy Theatre, in London, using Swan's bulbs.

Tesla, being a modest and unassuming man stood no chance against sophisticated businessmen like Edison and some other Americans; it is interesting the speculate what might have happened had he chosen to make his home in a less commercially-driven country than the USA.

Yes, it's interesting to speculate about such things. One wonders what other contributions Turing might have made had he not be hounded to suicide (or assassinated, as many believe) by the British government.

Or if Tesla had been a businessman.

I suppose Tesla did have one last laugh - he has a unit - the SI unit for magnetic field strength - named after him. So far as I am aware, there is no such thing as an "Edison".

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Originally posted by neveu:


Yeah, but the guy on the street doesn't know who Henry, Ohm, Sievert, Joule, Ampere, Weber, Celsius, or Coulomb are either.

Which brings up another question: Why did the public switch from saying "centigrade" to saying "Celsius?" It seems to have changed in the sixties or so. I'm sure Anders Celsius would call it "centigrade," since that describes it. Oh, and Coulomb: He's the guy who wrongly gets credit for discovering America.

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Coulomb: He's the guy who wrongly gets credit for discovering America.

No, that was Columbo who discovered America while investigating a murder.

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Originally posted by Proofreader:

No, that was Columbo who discovered America while investigating a murder.[/QUOTE] No, no, no! He designed Farrari's famous v12 engines! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_Colombo_engine