
Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary - tosh
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obituaries/alan-turing-overlooked.html
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danso
I really enjoy the “Overlooked” series of obits [0]. It’s interesting for some
of them to go back and see who the NYT printed obits for on the day/week of
the death. It’s not as if the sections are full of even more famous (if not
accomplished) persons — on an average day, it seems that there were plenty of
obits for people who were just relatively well-known in high society. Such
that if the NYT had a better focus on science back then, a few of the
overlooked women would have gotten at least a brief (though not the many who
were overlooked or ignored by their own field at the time.)

I think Turing is probably the most famous in his own time to have been in
“Overlooked”. Charlotte Bronte also has been featured but she died in the 19th
century.

[0]
[https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/overlooked](https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/overlooked)

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elliekelly
> I think Turing is probably the most famous in his own time to have been in
> “Overlooked”.

Although many on HN have probably never heard of her, I would argue Fannie
Farmer was just about as famous as a woman could be in her time. Not only was
she the Martha Stewart media mogul of the early 1900's but she was one of the
early pioneers of modern nutrition science. She was so well respected in the
field that she was invited to teach a course at Harvard Medical School decades
before women would even be permitted to enroll.

She's also the reason we all have measuring spoons and cups in our kitchens.

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tosh
> Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths,
> beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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zeristor
List of things named after Alan Turing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Ala...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Alan_Turing)

I was fairly sure there was a roundabout in Manchester called the Turing
roundabout...

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Animats
Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he
was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus;
Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did.
Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many
wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were
key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. The top cryptographer of WWII was William
Friedman, who turned cryptanalysis from guessing to machine-powered
statistical crunching. The first programmable computer was built by Konrad
Zuse.

Few people know any of those names today. Zuse should be remembered more. He
had the right idea, and built a working machine, but it was destroyed by bombs
during WWII.

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chubot
Are there any good books about Zuse? He's mentioned in passing in almost every
computer history book, like the "The Dream Machine".

Mostly they just say that his work was destroyed, and not much more, which is
a shame! And then they devote hundreds of pages to his contemporaries.

I searched Amazon and apparently has an autobiography, which doesn't appear to
be widely read:

[https://www.amazon.com/Computer-My-Life-Konrad-
Zuse/dp/35405...](https://www.amazon.com/Computer-My-Life-Konrad-
Zuse/dp/3540564535/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=konrad+zuse&qid=1559840310&s=gateway&sr=8-1)

~~~
microtherion
There is a rather nice archive of his papers here:
[http://zuse.zib.de](http://zuse.zib.de)

In the 1990s, I had to go through considerable lengths to obtain a physical
copy of his book describing his "Plankalkül" programming language; nowadays
it's conveniently available online.

