100 Years of Computer Science
computer-science-historyfoundational-paperstype-theoryinformation-theorycryptography
Abstraction: Curated timeline of ten landmark computer science papers 1923-2014
Key points:
- One paper per decade selected for world-changing impact: Brouwer (1923) intuitionism, Turing (1936) uncomputable numbers, Shannon (1948) information theory, Nash (1950) non-cooperative games, McCarthy (1958) Lisp, Lamport (1978) distributed systems clocks, Goldwasser-Micali (1983) probabilistic encryption, Steele (1998) growing a language, Castro-Liskov (1999) Byzantine fault tolerance, Wadler (2014) Curry-Howard correspondence
- Curry-Howard correspondence (Propositions as Types) connects logical proofs to functional program types, validating Brouwer's constructivism
- Lambda calculus dates from 1930s — predates C++ by decades; Bjarne Stroustrup was asked if lambdas were "hip new thing"
- Of 12 authors highlighted, 10 are male and all are white — author concludes academia uses only a fraction of available talent
- Leslie Lamport won 2013 Turing Prize for distributed systems work; Byzantine fault tolerance relevant to Bitcoin's 51% attack threshold
Connections: Alan Turing · Claude Shannon · Leslie Lamport · Information Theory · Computer Science History · Distributed Systems
Source: http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/100-years-computer-science