Communications of the ACM

mathematics. 3 Similarly, around 1955, Gorn became accustomed to viewing a universal Turing machine as a conceptual abstraction of the modern computer (see, for example, Gorn8). By the end of the 1950s, Carr and Gorn explicitly used Turing’s universal machine to express the fundamental interchangeability of hardware and language implementations. Turing’s 1936 theory thus helped influence ACM members to articulate a theoretical framework that could accommodate for what programmers had been accomplishing independently of metamathematics. 6

In 1965, ACM Vice President Anthony Oettinger (who had known Turing personally), and the rest of ACM’s Program Committee proposed that an annual “National Lecture be called the Allen [sic] M. Turing Lecture.” 1 Lewis Clapp, the chairman of the ACM Awards Committee, collected information on the award procedures “in other professional societies.” In 1966 he wrote: [a]n awards program […] would be a fitting activity for the Association as it enhances its own image as a professional society. […] [I]t would serve to accentuate new software techniques and theoretical contributions. […] The award itself might be named after one of the early great luminaries in the field (for example, “The Von Neuman [sic] Award” or “The Turing Award”, etc.) 2

ACM’s first Turing Awardee in 1966
was Perlis, a well-established computer
scientist, former president of the ACM,
and close colleague of Carr and Gorn.
Decorating Perlis is in hindsight thus
rather unsurprising. Turing, by con-
trast, was not well known in computing
at large, even though his 1936 universal
machine had become a central concept
for those few who wanted to give com-
puter programming a theoretical im-
petus and also a professional status.a
The first wave of recognition that
Turing received posthumously with
the Turing award in 1966 is but a ripple
when compared to the second wave.

a We speculate that Turing was preferred over von Neumann, because the latter was associated with hardware engineering rather than with theoretical foundations of programming. Moreover, it might be that for the more liberally minded Carr, Gorn, and Perlis, von Neumann was too strongly associated with conservative Cold War politics. There were other potential candidates as well, such as Emil Post. Historians are now starting to investigate these matters (see, for example, Daylight7).

Recently, Communications published two columns in which Turing’s legacy is put into a more historical context. 7, 9 We continue this line of research by focusing on how Turing functioned as a hero within the formation of computer science. We will do so here by comparing the consecration of Turing with that of Gauss in mathematics.

Making Gauss a Hero

In the early 19th century, the Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt sought to introduce mathematics as a discipline per se in higher education. To do so, he needed an icon to represent German mathematics. He turned to the one German who had been praised in a report on the progress of mathematics to emperor Napoleon: Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). Also, the new generation of mathematicians favored a conceptual approach over computations and saw Gauss as the herald of this new style of mathematics. As such, Gauss became synonymous with German mathematics for both political as well as more internal reasons.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the prominent mathematician Felix Klein developed this Gauss image into a programmatic vision. From 1886 onward, he had started to actively transform Göttingen’s mathematics department into the world’s foremost mathematical center. He promoted a close alliance between pure and applied mathematics and got cooperation with the industry on the way. On a national scale, he worked for the professionalization of mathematics education. To shape this disciplinary empire, Klein, too, used Gauss.

In his 1893 address to the first International Congress for Mathematics in Chicago, Klein talked about the latest developments in mathematics and spoke of: a return to the general Gaussian programme [but] what was formerly begun by a single master-mind [...] we must now seek to accomplish by united efforts and cooperation. 10

The edition of Gauss’ collected
works (1869–1929) provided an abun-
dance of historical material that Klein
used to build an image of Gauss sup-
porting his personal vision on math-
ematics. Klein portrayed Gauss as the
lofty German who was able to pursue
practical studies because of his theoret-
ical research, a portrayal that, although
very influential, was biased nonetheless.

In the 20th century, Klein’s interpretation of Gauss was picked up by the international mathematical community and was modified accordingly. In the U.S., following Klein’s 1893 address, Gauss’s fertile combination of pure and applied struck a note for a mathematical community that often worked closely in alliance with industry. 11 In France, after World War II, the Bourbaki-group emphasized the abstraction of Gauss’s work that transcended national boundaries and had helped pave the way for their structural approach to mathematics. However, in contrast with the Kleinian “pure mathematician,” Gauss was also “rediscovered” after the birth of the digital computer as a great calculator and explorer of the mathematical discourse. 4

Making Turing a Hero

Just like Gauss was instrumental to Humboldt and Klein to further the institutionalization of mathematics, Turing played a similar role in the professionalization of the ACM in the 1960s. This goes back to the 1950s, when some influential ACM members, including John W. Carr III, Saul Gorn, and Alan J. Perlis, wanted to connect their programming feats to modern logic. Stephen Kleene’s Introduction to Metamathematics (1952), which contained a recast account of Turing’s 1936 paper “On computable numbers,” was an important source.

In 1954, Carr recommended programmers to deal with “the generation of systems rather than the systems themselves” and with “the ‘generation’ of algorithms by other algorithms,” and hence with concepts akin to meta-