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Thanks for sharing this article...not familiar with Betty Shannon, but her husband, Claude Shannon was really a genius...His paper "A Mathematical Theory of Com

Thanks for sharing this article...not familiar with Betty Shannon, but her husband, Claude Shannon was really a genius...His paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is one of the most elegant papers that I have read... http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop... Sigh...the one hundred years before 1990 was really a period of giants, with Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert -- as well as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie and the other quantum guys... I have to admit it was those guys that inspired me to try to pursue a career in academia...but after I grew up, I found they were all dead -- or it might be the other way around...and many academic papers these days are filled with words that do not resonant, and with bloated references that do not shine -- some even marked with the acceptance rate of its publication to show off their elitism... Seems that the age when a 25-page PhD thesis, containing only 2 references, could still be well accepted is fading further and further away... ( https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperati... )

jonnybgood 9y ago
> Sigh...the one hundred years before 1990 was really a period of giants, with Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert -- as well as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie and the other quantum guys... Most of giants of that period are giants in hindsight. We can see the results of their work and how those results still hold up today. I imagine those in 2117 will have their giants between 1990 and 2090 just like we do today.
- qq66 9y ago
  Yes, but because human knowledge is so much greater than it was 100 years ago, a given lifetime of work is able to push knowledge forward less. Yes, we still have CRISPRs and other titanic discoveries, but even those are collaborations. There is no more room for an Isaac Newton who basically invents three different scientific fields.
  - wahern 9y ago
    Stephen Wolfram might disagree.
    - kirrent 9y ago
      I think he might, but that's more because he has a very high opinion of himself.
    - Insanity 9y ago
      I would have said Hawking or Knuth. Wolfram his personality (ego) always did bother me though.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    A field depends on the body of work that comes afterwards. At the time of its invention, it's just a paper. I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields. Remember that at one point, "computer science" was considered a subfield of "electrical engineering", and both of them have their roots in Claude Shannon's masters thesis. That's because after he published his result and it became widely known, thousands of others piled into those fields to study the consequences of digital circuits. Similarly, I'd bet that in a hundred years "computer science" isn't one field, it's at least half a dozen, and people will be studying the subfields of version control, distributed systems, CRDTs, neural nets, computer graphics, data storage, compression, information retrieval, and others. Actually, that isn't a hundred years, that's today.
    - cedex12 9y ago
      > I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields. I'm curious, who would those be?
      - pelario 9y ago
        Newtonian physics, Gravitational theory and Differential calculus.
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  hopefully that would be the case...or perhaps my world view is a bit too pessimistic, but I feel that these days there are just too many different goals -- and many of them are mutually exclusive -- are amalgamated in academia... I have seen quite a few cases where people with PhD degree in physics or mathematics went to Wall Street and became traders there and totally gave up their original pursuit of physics or mathematics... also it is not a small number of people who would choose to pursue an academic career not because their research interests them but because it brings them fame and admiration, as well as stability in life -- as once they obtain their tenure, they would go start companies and pursue profits, instead of discovery... I am not saying that there are not many people still hold their academic ideals pure and high...It is just that in this era when academic positions are highly respected, admired and well-paid, it might give people the incentive to pursue such a career not for its original purpose but for something else....And one of the very reasons why these days academic positions are highly respected, admired and well-paid was because those scientific and engineering giants in those old days had made really prominent and conspicuous contributions that made this world a significantly better place than it was a century ago -- and if we trace further to the reason why they chose science and engineering as their career in the first place and then made great contributions afterwards, it seems that in many cases it was not because science and engineering could bring them material profits, but rather they were genuinely interested and intrigued; and it was extremely fun to them... But of course, it is a very difficult to say whether there is such a general decline in our pursuit for knowledge in general (such measurement is hard!)...not to mention the complexity in the essence behind some of the declining factors and drives... Nevertheless, I wish that at the time when I am old and feeble, as I look back at those days in our time, I could say to myself, just as Odysseus might have said to himself, that I have lived in an age of many great ideals and many great heroes...Yet still, I feel that we should be warned that after the heroic Mycenaean period[1] ended, what immediately followed was several hundreds of years of darkness in the ancient Greek civilization[2]... Note: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages
  - pishpash 9y ago
    And because of those already in it, those oddballs who might value the ideal academy rarely get hired. The metrics are different: fund raising ability, collaboration, paper publishing, etc. It's just a regular self-promoting job now. On the other hand, the world is such that you don't need credentials to do truly independent work. You do need time and a way of supporting yourself, but at least you have means to be heard.
- gwern 9y ago
  Which of Shannon, Godel, Turing, von Neumann, Noether, Hilbert, Einstein, Dirac, or de Broglie are you implying were not regarded as giants in their own times?
  - jonnybgood 9y ago
    I wasn't clear. I read 'scientific giant' as a 'scientific giant to general society' (those who start touching pop culture/media) as opposed to giant only in their field. For example, Shannon and Turing became giants to general society later on. Very few during their time knew the world of today that Shannon and Turing were creating. Shannon and Turing are only recently being recognized (hollywood films and biographies) in general society because we all now undoubtedly live in their world. And that is arguably why we're now learning about Betty Shannon.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Maybe you missed reading the article under discussion? > His name has faded in our era, but in mid-20th century America, Claude Elwood Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories was a bona fide scientific star. In 1954, for example, Fortune featured Shannon in a list of the nation’s 20 most important scientists, alongside future Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, among others. Shannon also made the pages of Time and Life magazines, appeared on national television, and even earned a spread in Vogue, complete with a photo shoot by the renowned Henri Cartier-Bresson.
  - empath75 9y ago
    Being recognized within your field and the field itself being widely recognized are two different things. It takes a while for the public at large to recognize the importance of their contributions.
tnecniv 9y ago
Hell, Shannon's masters thesis [1] is probably the most important masters thesis ever written and it cites six references. [1] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/3454142...
eastWestMath 9y ago
Conversely, mythologizing/lionizing mathematicians like that is one of the more annoying habits our field has, and I'm glad it's dying out. There are people doing fantastically innovative work that's outside of the mathematical mainstream. It took the Oxford quantum computing group years until categorical quantum mechanics taken seriously, because it was so different than what the "great mathematicians" before them had done.
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  Quite true...and I think my point largely concurs with yours, in that it is the scholastic content, instead of the administrative formalities, that should be valued... I am not complaining about the giants are dead; I am complaining that the spirit of pursuing something truly great in academia seems to be fading out -- but of course, different people are most likely to see the world differently. Perhaps you still can enjoy that great atmosphere of pursuing truth rather than profits, which I feel really really glad to see and it helps me to restore some faith...It is just that perhaps these days I have seen a lot of dark lunatic side of academia that makes me feel pessimistic...
igravious 9y ago
I'd like to tie your comment to an article that was linked to here the other day. It was to a paper by the economist Paul Romer on `mathiness'[0]. It is interesting to me that the standard bearers for progress and achievement (you and others select) are either mathematicians and/or physicists. Why physicists over any other natural scientist? Perhaps because physics is math-heavy and reliant on mathematical domain models to an extent that other fields and disciplines are not. Let us review the fields of human exploration you have omitted. Art including music and literature, the social sciences, the life and medical sciences, economic and political theory, legal theory, the geo-sciences, … do I need to go on? What makes math and physics so special? And before you dismiss my comments, I say this as somebody who has studied the history of mathematics and has read books on likes of Erdös and Ramanujan. (For instance, I would place Brouwer ahead of Hilbert, and I wonder how one can speak of Turing and Gödel but not of Church and Russell.) As for the physicists you mention, two of them were involved in the project that created the most devastating weapons ever used by man against man, weapons that hang over humanity to this day. That is some legacy. Where has this math and physics devotion gotten us to? Collectively I mean. Where has it gotten us to collectively? I have come to believe that our entire culture is so much poorer because of it. Indeed the mindset is so pervasive that it has taken me me entire life to diagnose it in myself. Did not know about about the age of the 25-page PhD thesis containing only 2 references (a slight exaggeration?) though. That is indeed a loss. [0] https://paulromer.net/mathiness/ https://paulromer.net/mathiness/
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  > I'd like to tie your comment to an article that was linked to here the other day. It was to a paper by the economist Paul Romer on `mathiness'[0]. It is interesting to me that the standard bearers for progress and achievement (you and others select) are either mathematicians and/or physicists. Why physicists over any other natural scientist? Perhaps because physics is math-heavy and reliant on mathematical domain models to an extent that other fields and disciplines are not. Sorry...no offense to other fields...actually, I myself really don't think there is a definite separation in many fields that are administratively regarded as different...I personally feel that essentially they are all languages, using their different description systems to rationally describe the world as it is observed by them and then to make predictions... most of my study background has been in computer science -- although I really do not think there are much difference that makes it so distinguishable from math or physics...and actually, sometimes I could not tell the difference between math and physics...I feel they are merely terms (or identifiers) used to refer certain things; and as I already mentioned that quite often we do not need to manually put boundaries on those certain things, the differentiability of the different terms then does not really matter here... and if you like, we could call it study (or X) in general,or any other name would do, as long as it does not generate too much ambiguity... > I would place Brouwer ahead of Hilbert, and I wonder how one can speak of Turing and Gödel but not of Church and Russell. Yes, I was thinking of Church and Russell (and I really enjoy his non-math writing too) while I was writing those words...but then I felt that I would have to trace back to Georg Cantor -- and then I realized that I just need a few examples to make my points, instead of enumerating all the smart guys that I heard about (and many I even haven't heard about due to my insularity as human)...so I have to find a place to take a break... > Did not know about about the age of the 25-page PhD thesis containing only 2 references (a slight exaggeration?) though. That is indeed a loss. I did not know that either...I was looking for a 3-page PhD thesis, but did not find one (-- and also did not want to spend too much time on that)...then I came across John Nash's thesis -- so the act of ranting and complaining turned out to be a good learning experience as well...
SeanDav 9y ago
Everyone remembers the first person to break the 4 minute mile "barrier". I bet only a fraction of those people know who the current world record holder is for the mile and what his time is (even though he would have left Roger Bannister trailing distantly in his dust). Roger Bannister, Einstein, Turing et al were all giants but they are are well know because they were first and made giant strides in specific fields. People are no less clever or gifted today, but it is much harder to make breakthroughs when so much is already understood and achieved. In almost all fields it is currently incremental improvements.
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  hopefully, after many years, when we look back with our hindsight, we would find that we have been steadily moving forward...
JadeNB 9y ago
> Thanks for sharing this article...not familiar with Betty Shannon, but her husband, Claude Shannon was really a genius... There's no question about your characterisation, but he's hardly 'unsung'. I know you meant no ill (and voting isn't your fault), but it's a shame for an article about Betty to have its top comment be almost exclusively about her husband.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  next time in such occasions, I will try to write "Betty's husband", instead of "Claude Shannon", to show my respect for her...( BTW, did Melania's husband tweet anything interesting lately? ) But, may Betty rest in peace...(she passed away this past May)...
blizkreeg 9y ago
...which begs the question, who are the giants of today? Why are we not hearing about them? Why are they not as "well-known" today as these men and women were? One reason, as it appears to me, is that we are more in the age of the tech entrepreneur (primarily due to the Internet) as opposed to the late 19th/early 20th century which was the age of the inventor, the scientist. Research and inventions are a much higher barrier to entry and a much longer cycle of work. Starting a startup is the easier route to name, fame, and riches today. Sadly, I'm not sure it's for the better either.
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  > ..which begs the question, who are the giants of today? Why are we not hearing about them? Why are they not as "well-known" today as these men and women were? It seems that one implicit assumption made in your question is that there exists such "giant" today... Well, then that would depend on how you define "giant"...If we consider Isaac Newton as a giant, then perhaps one good description that illustrates his distinction is these two lines written by Alexander Pope: NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. In any age, inside any social structure that is not largely uniform, there are always "well-known" men or women -- that's a characteristic of human's social cognition capability... Due to my ignorance, I don't think that in our time I could identify any living person who has advanced our knowledge as significant as Isaac Newton or other of those "giants" ( -- I just borrowed this term from Newton in my initial post...) -- I am not commenting on the aspect of human well-being, and I am only ranting about our knowledge...but as I am too ignorant, perhaps only with hindsight I could see better... But still unless proved otherwise, there is a possibility there isn't (or won't be) any living giant in our time...This happened a few times in human history. For instance, 3000 years ago, after Mycenaean civilization ended, the Greek civilization seems to be moving into a state of falling back (which was a period that we refer as Greek Dark Ages): the practice of writing had ceased (i.e. linear B system), and even been forgotten in many places; their buildings were modest, and decorative art unimpressive -- even their favorite pottery was generally painted with less complex patterns ( -- perhaps it's not avant garde intentionally, as in our modern taste) ...bards and poets after the this dark period would only remember the heroes and giants in the Trojan war which happened in the Mycenaean age that preceded the dark age... Nevertheless, the Greek Dark Age would eventually end, like all other historical periods...but I just feel sad for those people living in the dark days, although they might very likely not share this similar empathy for themselves (or they might factually have lived a very happy life)...

jonnybgood 9y ago

> Sigh...the one hundred years before 1990 was really a period of giants, with Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert -- as well as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie and the other quantum guys... Most of giants of that period are giants in hindsight. We can see the results of their work and how those results still hold up today. I imagine those in 2117 will have their giants between 1990 and 2090 just like we do today.

qq66 9y ago
Yes, but because human knowledge is so much greater than it was 100 years ago, a given lifetime of work is able to push knowledge forward less. Yes, we still have CRISPRs and other titanic discoveries, but even those are collaborations. There is no more room for an Isaac Newton who basically invents three different scientific fields.
- wahern 9y ago
  Stephen Wolfram might disagree.
  - kirrent 9y ago
    I think he might, but that's more because he has a very high opinion of himself.
  - Insanity 9y ago
    I would have said Hawking or Knuth. Wolfram his personality (ego) always did bother me though.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  A field depends on the body of work that comes afterwards. At the time of its invention, it's just a paper. I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields. Remember that at one point, "computer science" was considered a subfield of "electrical engineering", and both of them have their roots in Claude Shannon's masters thesis. That's because after he published his result and it became widely known, thousands of others piled into those fields to study the consequences of digital circuits. Similarly, I'd bet that in a hundred years "computer science" isn't one field, it's at least half a dozen, and people will be studying the subfields of version control, distributed systems, CRDTs, neural nets, computer graphics, data storage, compression, information retrieval, and others. Actually, that isn't a hundred years, that's today.
  - cedex12 9y ago
    > I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields. I'm curious, who would those be?
    - pelario 9y ago
      Newtonian physics, Gravitational theory and Differential calculus.
68c12c16 9y ago
hopefully that would be the case...or perhaps my world view is a bit too pessimistic, but I feel that these days there are just too many different goals -- and many of them are mutually exclusive -- are amalgamated in academia... I have seen quite a few cases where people with PhD degree in physics or mathematics went to Wall Street and became traders there and totally gave up their original pursuit of physics or mathematics... also it is not a small number of people who would choose to pursue an academic career not because their research interests them but because it brings them fame and admiration, as well as stability in life -- as once they obtain their tenure, they would go start companies and pursue profits, instead of discovery... I am not saying that there are not many people still hold their academic ideals pure and high...It is just that in this era when academic positions are highly respected, admired and well-paid, it might give people the incentive to pursue such a career not for its original purpose but for something else....And one of the very reasons why these days academic positions are highly respected, admired and well-paid was because those scientific and engineering giants in those old days had made really prominent and conspicuous contributions that made this world a significantly better place than it was a century ago -- and if we trace further to the reason why they chose science and engineering as their career in the first place and then made great contributions afterwards, it seems that in many cases it was not because science and engineering could bring them material profits, but rather they were genuinely interested and intrigued; and it was extremely fun to them... But of course, it is a very difficult to say whether there is such a general decline in our pursuit for knowledge in general (such measurement is hard!)...not to mention the complexity in the essence behind some of the declining factors and drives... Nevertheless, I wish that at the time when I am old and feeble, as I look back at those days in our time, I could say to myself, just as Odysseus might have said to himself, that I have lived in an age of many great ideals and many great heroes...Yet still, I feel that we should be warned that after the heroic Mycenaean period[1] ended, what immediately followed was several hundreds of years of darkness in the ancient Greek civilization[2]... Note: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages
- pishpash 9y ago
  And because of those already in it, those oddballs who might value the ideal academy rarely get hired. The metrics are different: fund raising ability, collaboration, paper publishing, etc. It's just a regular self-promoting job now. On the other hand, the world is such that you don't need credentials to do truly independent work. You do need time and a way of supporting yourself, but at least you have means to be heard.
gwern 9y ago
Which of Shannon, Godel, Turing, von Neumann, Noether, Hilbert, Einstein, Dirac, or de Broglie are you implying were not regarded as giants in their own times?
- jonnybgood 9y ago
  I wasn't clear. I read 'scientific giant' as a 'scientific giant to general society' (those who start touching pop culture/media) as opposed to giant only in their field. For example, Shannon and Turing became giants to general society later on. Very few during their time knew the world of today that Shannon and Turing were creating. Shannon and Turing are only recently being recognized (hollywood films and biographies) in general society because we all now undoubtedly live in their world. And that is arguably why we're now learning about Betty Shannon.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Maybe you missed reading the article under discussion? > His name has faded in our era, but in mid-20th century America, Claude Elwood Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories was a bona fide scientific star. In 1954, for example, Fortune featured Shannon in a list of the nation’s 20 most important scientists, alongside future Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, among others. Shannon also made the pages of Time and Life magazines, appeared on national television, and even earned a spread in Vogue, complete with a photo shoot by the renowned Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- empath75 9y ago
  Being recognized within your field and the field itself being widely recognized are two different things. It takes a while for the public at large to recognize the importance of their contributions.

tnecniv 9y ago

Hell, Shannon's masters thesis [1] is probably the most important masters thesis ever written and it cites six references. [1] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/3454142...

eastWestMath 9y ago

Conversely, mythologizing/lionizing mathematicians like that is one of the more annoying habits our field has, and I'm glad it's dying out. There are people doing fantastically innovative work that's outside of the mathematical mainstream. It took the Oxford quantum computing group years until categorical quantum mechanics taken seriously, because it was so different than what the "great mathematicians" before them had done.

68c12c16 9y ago
Quite true...and I think my point largely concurs with yours, in that it is the scholastic content, instead of the administrative formalities, that should be valued... I am not complaining about the giants are dead; I am complaining that the spirit of pursuing something truly great in academia seems to be fading out -- but of course, different people are most likely to see the world differently. Perhaps you still can enjoy that great atmosphere of pursuing truth rather than profits, which I feel really really glad to see and it helps me to restore some faith...It is just that perhaps these days I have seen a lot of dark lunatic side of academia that makes me feel pessimistic...

igravious 9y ago

I'd like to tie your comment to an article that was linked to here the other day. It was to a paper by the economist Paul Romer on `mathiness'[0]. It is interesting to me that the standard bearers for progress and achievement (you and others select) are either mathematicians and/or physicists. Why physicists over any other natural scientist? Perhaps because physics is math-heavy and reliant on mathematical domain models to an extent that other fields and disciplines are not. Let us review the fields of human exploration you have omitted. Art including music and literature, the social sciences, the life and medical sciences, economic and political theory, legal theory, the geo-sciences, … do I need to go on? What makes math and physics so special? And before you dismiss my comments, I say this as somebody who has studied the history of mathematics and has read books on likes of Erdös and Ramanujan. (For instance, I would place Brouwer ahead of Hilbert, and I wonder how one can speak of Turing and Gödel but not of Church and Russell.) As for the physicists you mention, two of them were involved in the project that created the most devastating weapons ever used by man against man, weapons that hang over humanity to this day. That is some legacy. Where has this math and physics devotion gotten us to? Collectively I mean. Where has it gotten us to collectively? I have come to believe that our entire culture is so much poorer because of it. Indeed the mindset is so pervasive that it has taken me me entire life to diagnose it in myself. Did not know about about the age of the 25-page PhD thesis containing only 2 references (a slight exaggeration?) though. That is indeed a loss. [0] https://paulromer.net/mathiness/ https://paulromer.net/mathiness/

68c12c16 9y ago
> I'd like to tie your comment to an article that was linked to here the other day. It was to a paper by the economist Paul Romer on `mathiness'[0]. It is interesting to me that the standard bearers for progress and achievement (you and others select) are either mathematicians and/or physicists. Why physicists over any other natural scientist? Perhaps because physics is math-heavy and reliant on mathematical domain models to an extent that other fields and disciplines are not. Sorry...no offense to other fields...actually, I myself really don't think there is a definite separation in many fields that are administratively regarded as different...I personally feel that essentially they are all languages, using their different description systems to rationally describe the world as it is observed by them and then to make predictions... most of my study background has been in computer science -- although I really do not think there are much difference that makes it so distinguishable from math or physics...and actually, sometimes I could not tell the difference between math and physics...I feel they are merely terms (or identifiers) used to refer certain things; and as I already mentioned that quite often we do not need to manually put boundaries on those certain things, the differentiability of the different terms then does not really matter here... and if you like, we could call it study (or X) in general,or any other name would do, as long as it does not generate too much ambiguity... > I would place Brouwer ahead of Hilbert, and I wonder how one can speak of Turing and Gödel but not of Church and Russell. Yes, I was thinking of Church and Russell (and I really enjoy his non-math writing too) while I was writing those words...but then I felt that I would have to trace back to Georg Cantor -- and then I realized that I just need a few examples to make my points, instead of enumerating all the smart guys that I heard about (and many I even haven't heard about due to my insularity as human)...so I have to find a place to take a break... > Did not know about about the age of the 25-page PhD thesis containing only 2 references (a slight exaggeration?) though. That is indeed a loss. I did not know that either...I was looking for a 3-page PhD thesis, but did not find one (-- and also did not want to spend too much time on that)...then I came across John Nash's thesis -- so the act of ranting and complaining turned out to be a good learning experience as well...

SeanDav 9y ago

Everyone remembers the first person to break the 4 minute mile "barrier". I bet only a fraction of those people know who the current world record holder is for the mile and what his time is (even though he would have left Roger Bannister trailing distantly in his dust). Roger Bannister, Einstein, Turing et al were all giants but they are are well know because they were first and made giant strides in specific fields. People are no less clever or gifted today, but it is much harder to make breakthroughs when so much is already understood and achieved. In almost all fields it is currently incremental improvements.

68c12c16 9y ago
hopefully, after many years, when we look back with our hindsight, we would find that we have been steadily moving forward...

JadeNB 9y ago

> Thanks for sharing this article...not familiar with Betty Shannon, but her husband, Claude Shannon was really a genius... There's no question about your characterisation, but he's hardly 'unsung'. I know you meant no ill (and voting isn't your fault), but it's a shame for an article about Betty to have its top comment be almost exclusively about her husband.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
68c12c16 9y ago
next time in such occasions, I will try to write "Betty's husband", instead of "Claude Shannon", to show my respect for her...( BTW, did Melania's husband tweet anything interesting lately? ) But, may Betty rest in peace...(she passed away this past May)...

blizkreeg 9y ago

...which begs the question, who are the giants of today? Why are we not hearing about them? Why are they not as "well-known" today as these men and women were? One reason, as it appears to me, is that we are more in the age of the tech entrepreneur (primarily due to the Internet) as opposed to the late 19th/early 20th century which was the age of the inventor, the scientist. Research and inventions are a much higher barrier to entry and a much longer cycle of work. Starting a startup is the easier route to name, fame, and riches today. Sadly, I'm not sure it's for the better either.

68c12c16 9y ago
> ..which begs the question, who are the giants of today? Why are we not hearing about them? Why are they not as "well-known" today as these men and women were? It seems that one implicit assumption made in your question is that there exists such "giant" today... Well, then that would depend on how you define "giant"...If we consider Isaac Newton as a giant, then perhaps one good description that illustrates his distinction is these two lines written by Alexander Pope: NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. In any age, inside any social structure that is not largely uniform, there are always "well-known" men or women -- that's a characteristic of human's social cognition capability... Due to my ignorance, I don't think that in our time I could identify any living person who has advanced our knowledge as significant as Isaac Newton or other of those "giants" ( -- I just borrowed this term from Newton in my initial post...) -- I am not commenting on the aspect of human well-being, and I am only ranting about our knowledge...but as I am too ignorant, perhaps only with hindsight I could see better... But still unless proved otherwise, there is a possibility there isn't (or won't be) any living giant in our time...This happened a few times in human history. For instance, 3000 years ago, after Mycenaean civilization ended, the Greek civilization seems to be moving into a state of falling back (which was a period that we refer as Greek Dark Ages): the practice of writing had ceased (i.e. linear B system), and even been forgotten in many places; their buildings were modest, and decorative art unimpressive -- even their favorite pottery was generally painted with less complex patterns ( -- perhaps it's not avant garde intentionally, as in our modern taste) ...bards and poets after the this dark period would only remember the heroes and giants in the Trojan war which happened in the Mycenaean age that preceded the dark age... Nevertheless, the Greek Dark Age would eventually end, like all other historical periods...but I just feel sad for those people living in the dark days, although they might very likely not share this similar empathy for themselves (or they might factually have lived a very happy life)...