Topic: Biography/science and academia
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๐ Lynn Conway Has Died
Lynn Ann Conway (January 2, 1938 - June 9, 2024) was an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist.
She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the MeadโConway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry' infrastructure for chip design and production, and triggering a rush of impactful high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.
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- "Lynn Conway Has Died" | 2024-06-11 | 1667 Upvotes 328 Comments
๐ John McCarthy Has Died
John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 โ October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized time-sharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.
McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University. He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.
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- "John McCarthy Has Died" | 2011-10-24 | 1619 Upvotes 218 Comments
๐ Peter Naur has died
Peter Naur (25 October 1928 โ 3 January 2016) was a Danish computer science pioneer and Turing award winner. His last name is the "N" in the BNF notation (BackusโNaur form), used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages. He contributed to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.
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- "Peter Naur has died" | 2016-01-03 | 570 Upvotes 96 Comments
๐ Li Wenliang
Li Wenliang (Chinese: ๆๆไบฎ; pinyin: Lว Wรฉnliร ng; 12 October 1986 โ 7 February 2020) was a Chinese ophthalmologist who worked as a physician at Wuhan Central Hospital. Li warned his colleagues in December 2019 about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), later acknowledged as COVID-19. He became a whistleblower when his warnings were later shared publicly. On 3 January 2020, Wuhan police summoned and admonished him for "making false comments on the Internet". Li returned to work, later contracted the virus from an infected patient (who had been originally treated for glaucoma) and died from the disease on 7 February 2020, at age 33. A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him and the Communist Party formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked its admonishment of him.
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- "Li Wenliang" | 2020-02-11 | 350 Upvotes 206 Comments
๐ Alan Turing's 100th Birthday - Mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, scientist
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912ย โ 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was not fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, and because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14ย million lives.
After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine. The Automatic Computing Engine was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory, at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the BelousovโZhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.
Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts; the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 had mandated that "gross indecency" was a criminal offence in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.
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- "Alan Turing died 70 years ago" | 2024-06-07 | 103 Upvotes 136 Comments
- "Alan Turing's 100th Birthday - Mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, scientist" | 2012-06-22 | 146 Upvotes 19 Comments
- "Happy Birthday, Alan Turing" | 2011-06-23 | 78 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ Jonathan James
Jonathan Joseph James (December 12, 1983 โ May 18, 2008) was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died at his Pinecrest, Florida home on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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- "Jonathan James" | 2013-01-13 | 366 Upvotes 118 Comments
๐ Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (nรฉe Payne; (1900-05-10)May 10, 1900 โ (1979-12-07)December 7, 1979) was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was actually correct
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- "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin" | 2023-10-16 | 225 Upvotes 98 Comments
- "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin" | 2013-08-11 | 38 Upvotes 55 Comments
๐ Al-Jazari
Badฤซสฟ az-Zaman Abu l-สฟIzz ibn Ismฤสฟฤซl ibn ar-Razฤz al-Jazarฤซ (1136โ1206, Arabic: ุจุฏูุน ุงูุฒู ุงู ุฃูุจู ุงูููุนูุฒู ุฅุจููู ุฅุณูู ุงุนูููู ุฅุจููู ุงูุฑููุฒุงุฒ ุงูุฌุฒุฑูโ, IPA:ย [รฆldสรฆzรฆriห]) was a Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, artisan, artist and mathematician. He is best known for writing The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Arabic: ูุชุงุจ ูู ู ุนุฑูุฉ ุงูุญูู ุงูููุฏุณูุฉโ, romanized:ย Kitab fi ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiya, lit.ย 'Book in knowledge of engineering tricks') in 1206, where he described 100 mechanical devices, some 80 of which are trick vessels of various kinds, along with instructions on how to construct them.
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- "Al-Jazari" | 2014-09-07 | 286 Upvotes 122 Comments
๐ Kateryna Yushchenko
Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (Ukrainian: ะะฐัะตัะธะฝะฐ ะะพะณะฒะธะฝัะฒะฝะฐ ะฎัะตะฝะบะพ, Russian: ะะบะฐัะตัะธะฝะฐ ะะพะณะฒะธะฝะพะฒะฝะฐ ะฎัะตะฝะบะพ, December 8, 1919, Chyhyryn - died August 15, 2001) was a Ukrainian computer and information research scientist, corresponding member of USSR Academy of Sciences (1976), and member of The International Academy of Computer Science. She developed one of the world's first high-level languages with indirect address in programming, called the Address programming language. Over the period of her academic career, Yushchenko supervised 45 Ph.D students. Further professional achievements include Yushchenko being awarded two USSR State Prizes, The USSR Council of Ministers Prize, The Academician Glushkov Prize, and The Order of Princess Olga. Yushchenko was the first woman in the USSR to become a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming.
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- "Kateryna Yushchenko" | 2020-03-21 | 328 Upvotes 25 Comments
๐ Gรถdel's Loophole
Gรถdel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gรถdel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gรถdel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gรถdel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gรถdel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."
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- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2025-08-06 | 21 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-07-24 | 21 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-04-05 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-01-20 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2021-03-25 | 131 Upvotes 130 Comments