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Why There's No Nobel Prize In Computing
alphadogg writes "When Nobel Prizes are dished out each fall, the most accomplished professionals in computing, telecom and IT have usually been left out in the cold. That's because there is no Nobel Prize for these fields, and it's unlikely there will be one any time soon. According to the Nobel Foundation: 'The Nobel Prizes, as designated in the Will of Alfred Nobel, are in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Only once has a prize been added — a Memorial Prize — The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, donated by Sweden's central bank to celebrate its tercentenary in 1968. The Nobel Foundation's Board of Directors later decided to keep the original five prizes intact and not to permit new additions.' So, if IBM, Google, Apple or some other deep-pocketed tech company wanted to make a big donation along the lines of what Sweden's central bank did in 1968, maybe it could sway the Nobel Foundation to add a prize. But it most likely wouldn't be officially called a Nobel Prize."
At least I have a reason for never winning a Nobel Prize, unlike all those writers.
They'd just end up giving it to somebody like Zuckerberg rather than somebody like Knuth.
there's at least a dozen prizes already for computing related things(productive and games), and for the important things the inventors are already covered by current nobel prizes.
and there's no nobel prize for the best designed car either, so there..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
But they have the Fields Medal. Indeed, other disciplines have found ways round this problem. It is not the lack of a Nobel that is the issue, but the lack of a belief within the field that could bring about a comparable prestigious award.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This way, the Nobel Prize for Technology can have as much meaning as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Time Person of the Year
At the author of the article mentions, the ACM Alan M. Turing Award is the definitive award given out in the computer science community and is considered on par with the Nobel Prize. All the winners of the Turing Award have won the award based on work that has stood the test of time, typically on merit that was introduced 20+ years prior and still stands today as a fundamental and invaluable core contribution to the field. You will find contributions on computational theory, TCP/IP, programming language theory, HCI, cryptography, software engineer, and others.
Note, however, that the Turing Award does not cover IT or telecom.
Just as there is the fields medal in mathematics (and the new, perhaps more appropriate Abel prize), there is the ACM A.M. Turing award for computing.
The problem with making more nobel prizes is where do you draw the line? Why isn't there one for astronomy and astrophysics, separate from the one for physics (these guys really do complain about being lumped together alot), or organic, and inorganic chemistry. How about splitting the nobel prize in medicine into a 'procedures' and a 'biochemistry' category.
Why not a Nobel prize in business, as separate from a Nobel prize in economics? Or different sub branches of economics.
Hell, there are, at just the school I am at, (exactly) 50 different PhD programmes offered. Why doesn't each of those get a nobel prize? Women's studies and feminist research, history, music etc. There are people who do great work in all of those 50 programmes, well, ok, maybe not journalism or women's studies, but the other 48 anyway,
Nobel prizes are an odd tool. They are largely awarded, in the sciences at least, well after the work is done, and in many cases awarded clearly in a sequence (so that they can award both the discoverer of something really cool *and* all the people who made that discovery possible). Computing doesn't quite seem to be ready for that yet. All of the big work, especially on the hardware side, is done by corporations, with huge arrays of people involved, and as much as there are a lot of people who develop a lot of really neat and powerful novel algorithms they get Turing awards already... It would seem kinda silly to be rewarding Intel, or IBM or the like for their fundamental computer research. They do a lot of it, and they deserve industry recognition, (which they get), but I'm not sure it makes much sense to be handing them a nobel prize.
The Fields Medal is not granted to anyone who has passed their 40th birthday. So a lot of great mathematicians who have done great work after this age, or whose work was not recognized until after they were 40 will not be / were not awarded. This is ridiculous. If you are going to recognize great work, age should not play a part. It is not right. It also means that the Fields Medal is not comparable to the Nobel Prize which does not discriminate based on age.
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The Nobel prizes were created by the Will of Alfred Nobel, who died quite a long time before modern computers were even a remote possibility. Obviously there was no Nobel prize for computers - nor economics, since economics were not considered a science back then (note that the so called Nobel Prize in economics isn't a Nobel Prize - it's a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel). Maybe there is a need for an internationally recognized prize for outstanding achievements in the field of computer science... but it won't be and can never be a "Nobel Prize".
Complaining about the fact that Nobel didn't make a provision in his will to institute a prize for a field of science that didn't exists in his time makes even less sense than the creationist argument that evolution isn't a science since Darwin wasn't awarded a Nobel Prize (hint: Darwin died before Nobel).
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
As pointed out many times before.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"Literature"
What is TCP/IP if not telecom?
G.H. Hardy wrote:
I had better say something here about this question of age, since it is particularly important for mathematicians. No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. To take a simple illustration at a comparatively humble level, the average age of election to the Royal Society is lowest in mathematics. We can naturally find much more striking illustrations. We may consider, for example, the career of a man who was certainly one of the world's three greatest mathematicians. Newton gave up mathe- matics at fifty, and had lost his enthusiasm long before; he had recognized no doubt by the time he was forty that his greatest creative days were over. His greatest idea of all, fluxions and the law of gravitation, came to him about 1666 , when he was twenty- four—'in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time sine'. He made big discoveries until he was nearly forty (the 'elliptic orbit' at thirty-seven), but after that he did little but polish and perfect.
Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work a good deal later; Gauss's great memoir on differential geometry was published when he was fifty (though he had had the fundamental ideas ten years before). I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. If a man of mature age loses interest in and abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious either for mathematics or for himself.
One of the ostensible purposes of such prizes is to subsidize further research. If the recipient of a Fields Medal is past his or her prime, the monies will be wasted, Hardy's observation may no longer hold, but old traditions die hard.
Google and Intel do fund part of the $250,000 award that Turing Award winners receive.
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Why counteract Alfred Nobel's wish?