Re:Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius
by qq66 on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:29AM
(#14854462)
When Isaac Newton was old, he used to give his visitors a lock of his hair in a small gold case, because he knew, and they knew, that they would be museum pieces one day. He was right, I saw one of them in a museum. I don't think any living scientist could confidently do that today.
Re:Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius
by cedex12 on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:26AM
(#14854456)
> I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields.
I'm curious, who would those be?
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.