3 ms·

I guess living a reasonably long life is one of the prerequisites of getting a Turing Award.

• biofox 5y ago
  (1) Do ground-breaking work in your 20s or 30s; (2) spend 30 or 40 years promoting it; (3) win!
  • downut 5y ago
    I think LAPACK and later work were much more important than his work in the 80s. But those were intensely collaborative and required enormous amounts of collective work. Well deserving of the Turing, but how can it be attributed to one person?
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      One person gets the award each year. Gotta find somebody who deserves it. Fortunately the problem is in choosing who among the deserving gets it this year, not in identifying anybody who might.
• ketanmaheshwari 5y ago
  While this seems generally true, Don Knuth was 37 when he won.
  • pridkett 5y ago
    The field has gotten much much bigger since then. There were so many foundational contributions to the field of computer science that we’re still recognizing them today. There are subfields within subfields of computer science that attract as many researchers as were in all of computer science fifty years ago (think about some of the ML subfields like graph neural networks or style transfer for great examples of this). This means that new researchers not only have a lot more to learn (and also bigger shoulders to stand on), but also that it’s a lot harder to make your research generally applicable across enough of the breadth of computer science. That’s not to say that the work that Knuth performed wasn’t worthy of the Turing award, but we’re in a world now where you could easily be 37 and only recently have been awarded tenure (if you’re even lucky enough for that), making him an outstanding exception.