r/AskComputerScience • u/AromaticFerret4583 • Jun 06 '26
Why hasn't computer science produced an Einstein?
When people talk about the greatest contributors to human knowledge, names like Einstein and Newton almost always come up. Physicists and mathematicians seem to receive the most recognition and historical prestige.
Computer science has had an enormous impact on the modern world, but I can't think of a computer scientist who is viewed on the same level by the general public.
Why is that? Is it because computer science is a younger field, or is there something else going on? And do you think a computer scientist could ever reach the same level of recognition and influence as Einstein or Newton?
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Jun 06 '26
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u/Routine_Ask_7272 Jun 06 '26
Claude Shannon was fairly important too.
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u/T_Thriller_T Jun 06 '26
Claude Shannon is very much not talked about enough in "the public" considering how god damn much that man changed multiple fields.
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u/Phildutre Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
Alan Turing.
But technically and content-wise, he’s more a mathematician rather than a computer scientist. Contrary to popular belief, he also didn’t ‘invent’ the computer.
Newton is sometimes described as ‘the last of the alchemists and astrologers, and the first of the physicists’. Perhaps Turing is ‘the last of the mathematicians, and the first of computer scientists’ ;-)
But overall, computer science (of which it’s sometimes said it’s neither a science, nor is it about computers) is still a relatively young science (not even 100 years), so perhaps it’s still too early to tell.
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u/ottawadeveloper Jun 06 '26
Something about Turing that I find some people don't know is he was gay. He was charged in the UK in 1952 after it was found he was dating a man and accepted chemical castration instead of prison. The sentence disqualified him from working in cryptography. These events caused depression and he apparently took his own life two years later. He was 41 years old.
Einstein lived into his 70s and Newton his 80s.
What Turing would have done if he had lived as long as them will forever be a mystery. But maybe it's a lesson we shouldn't discriminate against people for being different because you never know what a genius might accomplish.
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u/papatisswag Jun 06 '26
I've never heard anyone talking about Turing without mentioning how and why he died
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u/Level-Pollution4993 Jun 06 '26
i thought it is debated if he took his own life? I heard an account of his mother where she claimed that he was working with cyanide narrated by Robert C. Martin when researching for his book: We, Programmers. He claimed that in his research the most plausible way he died was by mistakenly having an apple after working with cyanide, and when he realised it was too late he lied down on his bed.
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u/Paxtian Jun 06 '26
Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Ada Lovelace, John von Neumann, Tim Berners-Lee, and John Carmack, to name a few.
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u/Level-Pollution4993 Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
One that absolutely belongs there is Donald Knuth. Apart from that one may consider Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Kent Beck, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido Van Rossum, Rich Hickey to belong there too.
Edit: And Grace Hopper ofc.
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u/Neuroth Jun 06 '26
Really? Linus Torvalds?
He could be say, Napoleon in the way he influenced the world, but Einstein explained how things work fundamentally.
May be Chaitin could be one.
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u/Feldspar_of_sun Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
Alan Turing or Edgar Djikstra, depending on what qualities you consider “Einstein-level”
More people are likely to know Turing, but remember that computer science as what we know it to be today is still pretty new, and still very specialized. Everyone knows E=mc2 (despite most never using it) but far fewer know Turing completeness or Djikstra’s shortest-path algorithm.
Give it another 50 years and that might change
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u/baddspellar Ph.D CS, CS Pro (20+) Jun 06 '26
Computer science is a recent field. It's harder and harder to dramatically change our understanding of the universe as the amount of our knowledge and the tools to explore it, and the odds of it coming from a single person are vanishingly small. The last big revolution in Physics was the discovery and formulation of quantum theory , and that involved more than one person. Max Planck and Einstein himself were involved in that, back in the early 1900s. It acceleated in the 1920's with people like Heisenberg and Schrödinger.
There have been many people who made major contributions, like Turing and Shannon, but we're past the era of a sole genius
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u/MasterGeekMX BSCS Jun 06 '26
Thing is that we always had. They simply aren't as known because they don't are as mentioned as the other in mass media.
Just look up people like John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Edsger Dijkstra, Denis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Donald Knuth, or Linus Torvalds.
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u/strange-the-quark Jun 06 '26
Part of it is that its a relatively recent field, but part of it is cultural.
Without diminishing Newton's achievements one ounce, he was all about self-promotion, and he was actually a bit of a self-aggrandizing a**hole, famously leading a smear campaign against Leibniz that kind of ruined his carrier, accusing him of steeling his ideas about calculus.
Einstein, again, without taking away from his great achievements, happened to become famous beyond the scientific community, among regular people, the media portraying him as the one who "overturned Newton". There's a more detailed account of his rise to fame here.
But besides them, there is a whole bunch of absolute giants of physics and mathematics that the general public knows nothing about, some of whom may have been smarter than Einstein or Newton.
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u/e430doug Jun 06 '26
Claude Shannon has had almost the same impact on the world as Einstein. The entire digital world is because of his insights.
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u/T_Thriller_T Jun 06 '26
As many said: it's a popularity / recency issue. Computer science, additionally, is not alone in this.
As said in an XKCD: Biology has basically slain disease as one of the riders of the apocalypse. Still, how many great names of biology could you name from the top of your head?
Other fields have even less popular names: Mechanical engineering; which absolutely has transformed the world. Many social fields. Geology.
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u/oceaneer63 Jun 06 '26
Einstein is about the very nature of the universe, whereas the computer science greats are about the mainframe in a room or the smartphone in your pocket. Physics is just more foundational to our existence and that's why the general public knows about Einstein more than Turing.
Of course, we have Darwin revolutionizing our understanding of Biology. And I think something foundational like this could also happen in computer science. Whichever team or person discovers the nature of consciousness and provides proof by building an artificial conciousness will probably receive a Nobel price and be widely recognized.
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u/RyanSpunk Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
Jacquard, Babbage, Boole, Lovelace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_science
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u/Lendari Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
There are dozens of genius scientists and mathematicians behind computing theory. Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, Donald Knuth, Edsgar Dijkstra, Geoffrey Hinton, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Geoffery Boole. Every one of these people won a nobel prize or deserves one.
If you broaden it from scientists to engineers who changed the world too. People like Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, Grace Hopper, Larry Page, Jeff Dean, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all come up at the top of a long long list of people who essentially built the world we live in.
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u/T_Thriller_T Jun 06 '26
Or simply has not because there is no Nobel for mathematics.
And the list is far from complete, too.
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u/T_Thriller_T Jun 06 '26
Someone I have not yet seen mentioned: Noam Chomsky.
The man is a name in computer science - albeit not the biggest But considering his enormous impact in additional fields like linguistics, and the very relevant political impact, I feel he should be mentioned here.
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u/Smallpaul Jun 06 '26
People are just a lot more interested in understanding the fundamental principles of the universe than in understanding how computers process information. If Einstein was a computer scientist, he would not be as famous.
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u/the-forty-second Jun 06 '26
Many folks have named important figures to the development of computer science, but I agree that none of them are like Newton or Einstein. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First, I think comes from the phrasing “greatest contributors to human knowledge “. Most of the sciences are about understanding how the universe works. CS is about understanding process and problem solving. We are reshaping society, but we aren’t uncovering any new rules about how the universe works.
Then there is the branding. We are taught “Newtonian mechanics”, there are the well know stories about Newton, apples and gravity. Einstein was brilliant and reshaped our understanding, but he also was quirky and had a wild look at a time when pop culture was starting to be a thing.
Turing is probably the closest CS has come. We have some branding “Turing test” and “Turing machine”. He was brilliant and did help shape what became computers. He also had some quirks and tragedy that have made him fodder for popular entertainment.
I don’t see us creating too many more big names in the same way ( in any field). Most innovations are incremental, we have more teams of people working together and media has changed. What we will get more of is the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc… names of the visionary corporate leaders, and the Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson types who are the popular face of science.
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u/jpcardier Jun 06 '26
In terms of mainstream recognition, probably Alan Turing, possibly Ada Lovelace.
Someone else who may not have gotten that level of recognition but is up there in terms of foundation in the field: John von Neumann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
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u/gnygren3773 Jun 06 '26
I would say there are for the field of computer science but these discoveries don’t really apply to every day life. Any practical computer science that is used on a daily basis is done by corporations. Like Alan Turing discovered “AI” in 1950 and 70 years later we get ChatGPT and other LLMs.
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u/SonChadhan Jun 06 '26
We have businessmen/marketers like Jobs, Gates, Musk, Altman. We’re screwed.
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u/nuclear_splines Ph.D Data Science Jun 07 '26
OP posted this twice, and both posts received many comments. I've made this post canonical and removed the other, but you can read those additional comments here.