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Happy Birthday, Von Neumann (And Linus!)
noims writes "Sunday is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modern Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd." Update: 12/28 01:07 GMT by T : deja206 writes "Today (December 28, CET) also is Linus Torvalds' 34th birthday. Now we probably wouldn't be here talking about all this stuff if it weren't for him. Thank you for Linux, happy birthday!"
Interesting that you mention this combination, because even though Zuses computer was very advanced, it was not Turing complete.
Apparently ENIAC was neither, so von Neumanns contribution to the EDSAC may have indeed resultet in the first Turing complete machine.
Not quite my proudest possession, but I've
got one of his notebooks. It doesn't actually
have any writing in it, however. A friend
works at the Library of Congress manuscript
division. When papers are donated, any
non-archival materials are discarded, so she
gave me one of his *blank* notebooks.
[This is an amusing anecdote. Had this
been an actual troll, you would have felt
cold steel piercing your lip.]
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Tommy Flowers who in 1943 built the Colossus machine, which as well as being quick was, more importantly programmable and so was the precursor to the modern computer. Oh, and it also helped crack Germany's WWII codes.
It was destroyed, as were the blueprints, at the end of the war for secrecy/security reasons.
However, i would like to make a case that this was quite possibly the 'mother of all computers'.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- Albert Einstein
Also remember, kids, that Neumann was Hungarian, not German. Born and schooled in Budapest, Hungary. The name is Germanic solely because at the time (before World War I) Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. His father had bought a minor nobility title, and since Austria was the dominant half of the Monarchy (the ruling house, the Habsburgs were Austrian), the Germanic-sounding version was used more widely. To his friends, "John von Neumann" was actually "Neumann Janos".
Along with modern computer science, Von Neumnann also made contributions in several other areas of applied mathematics that are currently major areas of research and development.
... von Neumann, along with Dantzig and Kanotorovich, helped develop the field of linear/mathematical programming and, more generally, operations research.
For example -- although Nash got the book and movie treatment as well as the Nobel -- the pioneering work on the modern mathematical treatment of games ("game theory") is considered to be "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" (1944) written by Von Neumann and economist Oscar Morgenstern. Among their contribution include the concept of a zero sum game and the "minimax theorem."
Much closer to computer science
Of course, all three of these fields are related, with many of the same basic tools applicable to all three. But the fact that one man found so many seemingly different applications for the same basic matheamtical tools is still amazing. Regardless of whether Von Neumann was the father of modern computer science (personally, I lean toward Turing), I think we should follow the spirit of the original post and remember the birth of one of 20th Century's trule great thinkers.
What about Alonzo Church, who probably has just as much of a claim as Turing, both having given equivalent and simultaneous solutions to the Entscheidungsproblem?
Except that Turing's famous paper on computability came 1936...
It's already 28th down here in NZ. I don't know if it's karma, sign from the above or something else but my, so far pretty stubborn, teenage son had just asked me to wipe Win98 of his PC and install Linux instead. I'm just glad that it happened on Linus' birthday.
First, there is no such work by Asimov.
Second, the pertinent Turing paper was published in 1936.
Heh, actually that's just his nobility title. :-)
/. reading.
Margitta is a small village. Way back in Ye Olden Days, nobility involved ownership of counties and the taxes collected there. As the noble families grew in members, that proved to be less and less workable in practice: less and less land for each claimant. Even practices like "all land goes to the firstborn" couldn't stop the dilution. By Neumann's time, the situation was so bad that for most noblemen (gentries), their land was just a small farm. I'm not aware of the Neumanns owning any more than that either.
After this OT, we return you to your regular