>>10849725>Church did most of the math No he didn’t. While TM’s and lambda calculus are both equivalent in computing power, they express computation in two distinct ways that reveal important results. Lambda calculus was important in the field of compilers to understand computation as a set of rules on symbols (think the y combinator and its role in specifying recursion and fixed point phenomena). Turing machines modeled instructions as data, gave a intuitive way to represent mechanical computation and physical realizability of the computer. Both of them showed with these models that the halting problem is undecidable via diagonal arguments. They were both prolific logicians
Von Neumann was a brilliant scientist, but he had his name attached to a lot of things he really didn’t contribute much to. The “von Neumann architecture” was literally just an electrical specification of turing’s model, except incredibly inefficient since there was only one bus that that could only read or only write in a specific step. The model we use is actually the Harvard architecture, which had dedicated read busses and write busses.
Also, neither Church nor Turing were the biggest hard hitters in TCS despite being named fathers of modern CS. Cook, Lovasz, Kolmogorov, Sipser, Rabin, Karp, Dijkstra, Komlosh, Zemereti, etc. are all people who pushed the field way forward to the point where theory is way more sophisticated than the simple models that church and Turing devised. A good number of those TCS researchers and current ones are lgbt, funnily enough, but they’re better at mathematics than you and I would ever be, and as far as I can tell, they didn’t get there on “diversity points.”
