Comment on Yoshi's Blog

I posted some commentary on Yoshi's blog, but not all of it would fit. Here's the full bit:

Dude, your English skills never fail to amaze me. If my Japanese were as good as your English is, I'd be in good shape. How'd you get so damn fluent? Back at OSU, at one point I wondered if you really spoke Japanese!

About Turing, he was a pretty amazing guy. His contributions to the War effort were of course enormous on the Western front. One has to wonder how much else he would've been able to accomplish if he hadn't been persecuted for his homosexuality. Perhaps if he had emigrated to the U.S. he would've been treated less discriminatorily. Wikipedia has an entry on Turing with various tidbits of information. I didn't know he was a marathon-runner, for instance.

John von Neumann, another critical figure in the development of computers, apparently knew of Turing. Von Neumann was involved with the Manhattan Project, not cryptography, but also had a hand in developing the fledgling field of computer science. Then of course there's Norbert Wiener, who advanced the development of control theory, and invented the field of cybernetics. Wiener's interest in the field developed from research in WWII—it's amazing how much technology was developed as a result of that war. I've read that Wiener was very matter-of-fact about the necessity of war; that, plus a great quote attributed to him, made me a fan of the guy, even though he died half a century ago.

Still, it's amazing how many critical people in history are never given credit for their work, or never are ascribed the importance that they really had. Two people who greatly shaped the 20th century, Nikola Tesla (the reason we have AC electricity today, as well as radio, the Tesla coil, and a slew of other inventions) and to a lesser extent Philo Farnsworth (inventor of the television, who later came to despise the way it was being used), were never given appropriate credit for their inventions.