Anyone want to wager on the next three Turing Award winners?
My nominations:
Peter Shor
Maurice Herlihy
Richard Stallman
Mario Szegedy
Bill Dally
My nominations:
Peter Shor
Maurice Herlihy
Richard Stallman
Mario Szegedy
Bill Dally
hmmm, i think Turing Awards are more biased towards theoretical contributions to CS (even for systems people). Although Stallman has made great contributions to the field of computing, he isn't an academic CS researcher, so he might not be in the running :/
"It is given to an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field"
I think his work with GNU has been one of the most important technical contributions to the community we've seen.
On a non-technical note, his push for free software has also been incredibly influential for the community. While I disagree with a lot of ideology and in particular the ideology behind the GPL personally, I think the world is generally better for it.
I would be surprised if Stallman got a Turing Award however. I can't think of anything beyond his philosophy that makes him stand out in any technically innovative way.
"Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and many tools in the GNU Coreutils."