John McCarthy. September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011.
Some say it is inevitable - a technological singularity achieving a level of computational power sufficiently complex to label as intelligent. This is debatable. In the case that this turns out to be true, future generations of synthetic consciousness will owe their existence to John McCarthy. The is not debatable.
McCarthy literally invented the term “artificial intelligence” in the 1950’s, providing an entirely new field of research for legions of logicians, programmers, cognitive psychologists, math nerds, and the like. If that wasn’t enough already , McCarthy took Church’s typed lambda calculus and converted it into a revolutionary kind of programming language. Derived from the phrase “LISt Processing”, LISP is arguably one of the most elegant programming languages ever invented, becoming the goto language for research in artificial intelligence.
Claude Shannon. April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001.
It has been remarked that Claude Shannon’s 1937 paper, “A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits,” was the most important master’s thesis in modern time. The major result of this paper was a correspondence between Boolean algebra and electrical circuits. This was that foundational work that paved the way for digital computing, making Shannon the “father of information science.” Nearly every digital circuit that exists in any computer today is based on the fundamental ideas presented by Shannon almost 75 years ago.
Kurt Gödel. April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978.
Author David Foster Wallace once referred to Kurt Gödel as “modern math’s absolute Prince of Darkness,” and rightfully so. Gödel’s major contributions to mathematics were his two incompleteness theorems. These theorems showed that any formal system of mathematics powerful enough to perform basic arithmetic will contain true statements that can never be proven. Many mathematicians have found this to be incredibly upsetting. Besides that, if mathematics were to have an evil super villain, nobody could look more sinister than Kurt Gödel.
