Scooter wrote:I could also point to the case of Alan Turing, who, while not completely expunged from history, certainly never got the kind of recognition his contribution to winning WWII deserved, through whose ingenuity and leadership the German naval Enigma code was broken. The man was as responsible for winning the war as any general who became a household name. His contribution could not become public knowledge in the immediate postwar period because of the need to preserve secrecy, but he never got the chance while he lived to get the recognition he deserved, or to use his genius to continue to advance the field of computer science, because he was convicted for engaging in homosexual activity, lost his security clearance, and ended up committing suicide by cyanide poisoning. It was only through the efforts of gay activists to rehabilitate his reputation that he belatedly achieved a modest level of fame, nowhere near commeasurate with his accomplishments.
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A prime example of being willfully or blissfully ignorant of basic history?
'while not completely expunged'?
Please. Alan Turing and the Turing machine was the FIRST thing taught at the US college and HS level. Canadian milage apparently differs. They even went as far as to call him the father of computer science, which is pretty fortunate considering I have a degree in it.
While I expect those reading these words
here to have zero grasp of the concepts presented by any study of his work, the fact remains that nearly every text I purchased in my schooling years (you know, back when people read books and formed concepts instead of 'web content') had his work in mention - some far more in depth than others.
What was NOT mentioned was his sexuality. So I read and learned about finite state machines and the infamous halting problem, but not about his dick sucking. In fact, it never occured to me to even begin searching into his sexuality nor did it occur to any of my peers or professors until you brought it up. Simply because it is irrelevant.
So while the planet was content of focussing on his contributions, you were content on focussing on whether or not he swallows. Well thats just par for the course.
Suffice to say, any teaching of history, or any other subject, should be concentrated on any individuals contributions to the topic in question, not whether they do it face up or face down. The loss of THAT distinction is one of the root causes why everything is so fucked up today.
Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person for technical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's highest honour, equivalent to the Nobel Prize
On 13 March 2000, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines issued a set of stamps to celebrate the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, one of which carries a recognisable portrait of Turing against a background of repeated 0s and 1s, and is captioned: "1937: Alan Turing's theory of digital computing".
The Princeton Alumni Weekly named Turing the second most significant alumnus in the history of Princeton University, second only to President James Madison.
In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, and stated: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."
And I could go on, suffice to say it seems he is and has been recognized, especially as the 20th came to a close, without considering his proclivities and without californias help.
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