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Comment by porpoisely | Hacker News Reader

It is a shame shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves. Computer science has many fathers and as amazing as Turing was, nobody contributed more and nobody has a better claim to call himself the father of computer science than Shannon. Not Turing. Not Church. He outstrips them all but nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him.

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Just two nights ago, on Amazon Prime streaming, I watched the very good show "BBC Order And Disorder Episode 2 - Information" hosted by the excellent Jim Al-Khalili. He profiles Alan Turing and says that Turing was only half the story and then introduces Claude Shannon—a name with which I was unfamiliar—and Bell Labs. Great stuff.

Great documentary. I can heartily recommend all of Al-Khalili's documentaries: "Atom", "The End of the Universe", "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" and "Chemistry: A Volatile History" are all excellent. The last two are my favorites; while his documentaries on physics and quantum mechanics are good, they describe scientific phenomena that are pretty difficult to understand, let alone visualize, and it ends up having to be a little over-simplified, or explained with unsatisfying visual analogies. The ones on chemistry and electricity are a lot more (no pun intended) grounded, and include some fun demonstrations.

Wow, thank you. I will seek out those shows.

I did some googling and it looks like you can see at least some of this stuff online: http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/chemistry-a-volatile-h...

Thank you. I discovered last night that some of the shows you mention are not on amazon Prime. Only the more astronomical and physics-related ones are (Gravity; Order/Disorder; Everything/Nothing; Beginning/End of the Universe).

Email me if you can't find them. I should be able to dig up a source.

Thank you. I found them all on YouTube.

Shannon came up much more than Turing during undergrad for electrical engineering. Can't learn signal processing, information theory, discrete math, etc without mentioning him. Perhaps he falls in the EE/ECE realm more than CS

Actually, I think Shannon might be more known than Turing.

Pretty much anyone doing signal processing, which is part of the standard physics curriculum where I'm from, will be introduced to the Nyquist–Shannon theorem while Church and Turing did fundational work in logic and computability but with far less practical application.

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