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Comment by peach_extract | Hacker News Reader

I've always considered Bell Labs to be the ultimate brain team. They're like the Dream Team of math, science and engineering.

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I think there are plenty of teams of this caliber out there. They're just working on less impactful or more stubborn projects. If Bell Labs hadn't existed, I believe it wouldn't have been long before most of the breakthroughs that came from there came from other places instead.

Really? Just off the top of my head, here are some of the people that worked at Bell Labs:

Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, William Shockley, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, John Hopcroft & Brian Kernighan. (I am probably forgetting several Nobel prize and Turing award recipients)

Did they work there at the same time? What were the respective team sizes.

I get the feeling the Manhattan Project is pretty high up with regard to Nobel Prizes / Scientists employed, at least if you count only the research team at the Los Alamos site (the total team was in the 6-digits IIRC because of "Computers", Military staff, and all the physical work of enrichment and metalworking)

I think there's one school in Budapest that might have more laureates among an even smaller student body. Coincidently (or not) there's a rather large overlap of that group an Los Alamo (.

Some people at the time felt that C and Unix were a setback to computing compared with Lisp, in the same way that Microsoft Windows was a setback compared to Unix. Bell Labs is the canonical example of "Worse is Better", also called the "New Jersey Philosophy".

One could also argue that both Windows and Unix were necessary phases for general computing given limited hardware resources, and only now is the stateless functional paradise envisioned at MIT in the 1960's actually possible.

Progress comes in waves. Windows might have been a set back from Apple, but it was more easily available.

While their practical achievements have had tremendous affect on a specific level of a revolutionary industry: Von Neumann alone was smarter and more influential than any three of them combined (maybe excluding Shannon).

To be fair that's also true of almost any three people involved in the Manhattan Project too.

Not a maybe for Shannon. He is still having a trememdous impact. Information theory has developed by Shannon is so fundamental that we forget about it these days. But big.

I could argue for Shockley and Hamming, but they were more on an engineering side.

RAND corporation in both depth and longevity is pretty impressive.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/a/asimov_isaac.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/v/vonneumann_john.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/n/nash_john_f.html

https://www.rand.org/about/history/nobel/bibliography.html

Well, Shannon yes.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan, on the other hand, aren't of the same caliber as people like Shannon and Feynman (and the Manhattan project all-stars).

They've had a huge influence on programming, and on IT, but not always for the better from an academic and quality perspective (e.g. Worse is Better), and more as pragmatic hackers and tinkerers than deep thinkers.

This is almost certainly true. Breakthroughs in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering occur when the conditions are ripe; if you look into every major famous breakthrough, you find that it was being duplicated or research along similar lines being pursued elsewhere in a very close timeframe. Geniuses are fungible.

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