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> This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago.

Claude Shannon never won it.

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That's an interesting point. I interpret the prize's criteria "for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community" to be less in Claude's space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I've implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this.

On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use Kirchhoff's laws everyday.

I see a number of theory guys on the list. That's the thing that's interesting about Shannon's exclusion: for any given explanation, there's a counterexample on the list. I've never really known anyone involved very seriously in the ACM, those guys probably know why he was excluded.

Stephen Cook, Micali, Goldwasser, Rabin, Scott, Karp, Hartmanis, Stearns, Manuel Blum, Yao and Valiant. These are all pure theoreticians; I didn't include data structures people and applied-ish cryptographers like RSA and DH.

More than a significant fraction of Turing awards have been won by theoreticians.

Let's hope he will be awarded one day, posthumously.

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