Andrew Appel

Transcription

ANDREW APPEL: 2012 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, who in many ways is the founder of computer science. When Alan Turing arrived at Princeton in 1936, there was no such thing as a computer science department, here or anywhere. The math department, as it was at Princeton in the 1930s, had been built by Oswald Veblen. He recruited some of the best mathematicians and logicians in the world. The Institute for Advanced Study was founded in about 1930, in Princeton, and for the first 10 years of its existence it shared a building with the Princeton math department, here in the old Fine hall. And this is where Turing and Church and von Neumann and even, Einstein, would have had their afternoon tea and discussion. So when Alan Turing was about 23 years old, in Cambridge, Alan Turing sent his paper "On Computable Numbers" off for publication and then he came to Princeton, to study with Alonzo Church. Turing's paper, in 1936, was so revolutionary that very few people understood it. Alonzo Church understood it, at Princeton, and Kurt Godel, but these were geniuses. One could say, that the greatest computer science department in the world in the 1930s was the Princeton math department because Church's lambda calculus became the prototype of programming languages that we use. Turing's machine became the prototype of the computers developed by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in which the program is just stored as data in the memory of the computer. When we program a computer today, we don't have to go change the wiring, we just load in a program and that concept goes back through von Neumann, to Turing, and in some ways all the way back to Kurt Godel, in 1931. Today Princeton, in the 21st century, has a real computer science department. It Is one of the great computer science departments of the world. We study many of the same things that Alan Turing himself, was interested in; the theory of computation, the construction of real computers, we study artificial intelligence, which Turing became interested in in the late 1940s, we study the applications of computation to biology, which Turing became interested in in the early 1950s. We owe a lot to Alan Turing and the mathematicians at Princeton in the mid-20th century.