Kris Jordan

Newton once said “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.”

I noticed on Brown’s home page that a professor of Computer Science, Stan Zdonik, was recognized as an ACM Fellow.

This sent me crawling through the ACM pages regarding fellows and then onward to ACM Turing Award Recipient’s such as UNC’s Dr. Fred Brooks. The ACM Alan M. Turing Award is the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. Recipients are the biggest movers and shakers in the field and are recognized for incredibly significant contributions to the field.

Some of the recipients I have heard of, most I have not. Brooks, Dijkstra, Knuth, Cerf were the names which stood out to me. Regarding the accomplishments of the 36+ other recipients I would like to learn more. I am sure in many cases it will simply be putting a name with a concept I am already familiar with. Reading about these scholars and gaining a deeper understanding of where the field has come from is something I will be doing between now and graduate school. Neat findings will be kept track of here along the way.

The first tidbit which I found interesting was Dr. Allen J. Perlis’ “Epigrams on Programming.”

Some of my favorites:

• Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
• It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
• Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
• A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.