[SIGCIS-Members] Turing, von Neumann, and the Matthew Effect

Wed Feb 25 20:23:32 PST 2015

I prefer Billy Holiday's version to Robert Merton's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_1LfT1MvzI

Or how about Bill Clinton?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqB7UEdhKug

By coincidence I just came back from seeing "The Imitation Game." It is obviously show-biz. I had to bite my tongue but it was OK. If you think this movie was bad, don't start me on the problems with "Gravity"! One thing that bothered me in the film was a conversation Turing was having about a "programmable digital computer." Neither "program" nor "digital" would have been in use at the time, as has been documented by David Grier in an Annals piece, and by myself in my last book. On the plus side, they say that a computer can "think differently," obviously a dig at Steve Jobs for his mangling of the Queen's English in his ad campaign for Apple.

God bless the child,

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Dag Spicer
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 9:47 AM
To: PeterEckstein at comcast.net; John Impagliazzo; Computer, SIG
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Washington Post article about Turing

BTW, Merton’s original Mathew Effect paper is available here: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthew1.pdf

Dag

On Feb 24, 2015, at 5:44 PM, PeterEckstein at comcast.net<mailto:PeterEckstein at comcast.net<mailto:PeterEckstein at comcast.net%3cmailto:PeterEckstein at comcast.net>> wrote:

I consider this interview and the article to be nothing more than PR puffery on the part of Princeton. Isaacson is quoted as saying that Turing did not invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but somehow the article goes on to give as much glory as possible to Princeton but never mention the names of those Isaacson said were the real inventors--John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. They built ENIAC before there was any clear technology in which to store a program, and, after  the ENIAC design was frozen, they and several others at Penn set out to develop the architecture of a next-generation stored-program computer that they named EDVAC. At some point von Neumann, who had never seen a computer before, joined the group and contributed to its thinking, and he volunteered to write up their conclusions, which were issued in a typed (and widely distributed) paper that bore his name alone. Von Neumann was, as I believe the article calls him, a protean genius, but attributing the stored-program concept to him is, indeed, an example of the Matthew Effect gone wild.

________________________________

From: "John Impagliazzo" <John.Impagliazzo at Hofstra.edu<mailto:John.Impagliazzo at Hofstra.edu<mailto:John.Impagliazzo at Hofstra.edu%3cmailto:John.Impagliazzo at Hofstra.edu>>>

To: "Paul Ceruzzi" <CeruzziP at si.edu<mailto:CeruzziP at si.edu<mailto:CeruzziP at si.edu%3cmailto:CeruzziP at si.edu>>>, "sigcis" <members at sigcis.org<mailto:members at sigcis.org<mailto:members at sigcis.org%3cmailto:members at sigcis.org>>>

Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 2:02:42 AM

Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Washington Post article about Turing

Thanks, Paul.

Below is the link to the article for those who do not have access to it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-imitation-game-didnt-tell-you-about-alan-turings-greatest-triumph/2015/02/20/ffd210b6-b606-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html

John

John Impagliazzo, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, Hofstra University

IEEE Life Fellow

ACM Distinguished Educator

Editor-in-Chief, ACM Inroads

From: members-bounces at sigcis.org<mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org<mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org%3cmailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org>> [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Ceruzzi, Paul

Sent: Saturday, 21 February, 2015 08:47

To: sigcis

Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Washington Post article about Turing

On the front page of today's Washington Post is an article by Joel Achenbach about Turing's 1936 paper and its influence on computer science. All well and good, except later on he quotes the Chair of the Computer Science Department at Princeton as saying "...Turing invented computer science and John von Neumann built the first stored-program computer." An example of The Matthew Effect ("them that's got shall have; them that's not shall lose").

Overall, Achenbach has written an very good summary of Turing's contributions. He also gets one thing right (unless I am mistaken): we really don't know to what extent von Neumann and Turing discussed these concepts when both were at Princeton.

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This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<mailto:members at sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
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