26
votes
Accepted
Who coined the term "signal-to-noise ratio" and when did statisticians start using the term "noise" to describe randomness?
You are looking at relatively recent references. Noise originally comes from telecommunication analysis in early 1900s well before Shannon; basically, the electrical noise was heard as audible noise- ...
- 4,398
16
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
A case from this year is that of Aubrey de Grey.
Aubrey de Grey, a biologist known for his claims that people alive today will live to the age of 1,000, posted a paper to the scientific preprint site ...
- 601
12
votes
Accepted
Does Blum's speedup theorem have any conceptual predecessors?
The resemblance is not superficial. There is a precise relation between computer programs and formal proofs known as the Curry–Howard correspondence that took shape in 1960s. And Gödel's results on ...
- 80k
11
votes
Accepted
Why would Margaret Hamilton and her team at NASA print the code on paper?
This is how computer programming was done in those days. There was no such thing as a modern
terminal with a screen, and no keyboards.
A programmer would write her code first on paper (handwritten), ...
- 51.1k
10
votes
Accepted
Was there an intentional purge of all audio recordings of Alan Turing?
There is no evidence for an intentional purge of all audio recordings of Alan Turing. The BBC recordings seem to be the only ones ever made by Turing, so there wasn't really anything to "purge&...
- 1,262
9
votes
Accepted
What is the first reference to a nondeterministic Turing machine?
According to SEP, non-determinism was introduced by Rabin and Scott in Finite Automata and their Decision Problems (IBM Journal of Research and Development, 3(2) 114–125, 1959). Their main result was ...
- 80k
9
votes
Accepted
How did Lenna become the most used image in image processing?
Speaking as someone who worked in imaging tech and related fields from '79 to whenever, I can offer a little more. This image does contain a wide range of spatial frequencies as well as intensity ...
- 2,578
9
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
A well-known example is the work of Marjorie Rice on pentagonal tilings of the plane.
Wikipeidia:
In December 1975, Rice came across a Scientific American article on tessellations. Despite having ...
- 10.6k
8
votes
What is the first historical reference to the binary search algorithm?
In Jataka, there's a story about Losaka
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/j1/j1044.htm
So in time it came to pass that the people fell into a wretched plight. Reflecting that such had not been their ...
8
votes
Why so hard to find references to pictures of Raymond Boyce?
I think the answer to the main question is clear from his Wikipedia biography: Boyce died in 1974 aged 27, the same year SQL was released. He was a young researcher working for IBM in a pre-digital ...
- 1,224
7
votes
Accepted
Was Charles Sanders Peirce aware of Charles Babbage's difference engine?
Not only was Peirce aware of the difference engine, he was also aware of the analytic engine, that was never built, of Jevons's 1870 machine, and was later personally involved with designing its ...
- 80k
7
votes
Accepted
Where does this quotation attributed to Turing actually originate from?
I have convinced myself that this quote is not by Alan Turing, much of this is indebted to kimchi lover's leads. The main issue here is that summary characterizations and paraphrases are misread as ...
- 3,149
6
votes
Accepted
Why was the 'differential entropy' from information theory so named?
There is a curious discrepancy between the Russian and the English pages of Wikipedia on "differential entropy". The English page is rather vague on the origin, but the Russian page states ...
- 80k
6
votes
Accepted
How did von Neumann come up with his merge sort algorithm?
Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) Vol. 3 "Sorting and Searching" gives a detailed account on the history of ideas, including the sorting by merging, in Chapter 5.5. ...
- 358
5
votes
Accepted
Can you provide pages 7, 8, 25 of the 1969 edition of the Art of Computer Programming?
If you search for the book here, you will be able to find the libraries near you that have this edition. You may be able to arrange an interlibrary loan if it is too far to travel.
I also checked a ...
- 66
5
votes
When was the first appearance of the abbreviation RSA?
Nor does it appear in A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems (Communications of the ACM Volume 21 Issue 2, Feb. 1978 Pages 120-126), which was Rivest-Shamir-Adleman's ...
- 80k
5
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
There was a peculiar case when an anonymous forum commenter made significant progress on a problem. They could well have had substantial formal training (reading their posts I think this is likely).
...
- 601
5
votes
What happened to cybernetics?
Perhaps Cybernetics lost some of its charm because Claude Shannon created Communications Theory 1 in 1948, which put the hazy concept of "communications" in firm, mathematical terms, which ...
- 51
4
votes
Accepted
What technologies were used before JavaScript?
Javascript is older than Flash and ActiveX.
Originally, it was developed by the Netscape, as the "small cousine" of the Java.
The "World Wide Web" was originally developed only for ...
- 909
4
votes
Who coined the term “machine learning”?
The earliest reference appears to be:
... it is easy to see how a machine could be programmed so that it appeared
to learn... whether it would in principle be possible to construct a generalized ...
- 370
4
votes
Entscheidungsproblem vs. Unvollständigkeitssatz
The two problems of completeness (Vollstandigkeit) and decidability of the predicate calculus were clearly defined in 1928 into the first "modern" mathematical logic textbook:
David Hilbert and ...
- 15.2k
4
votes
Accepted
Did Albert Einstein write a computer program?
No. Very few people had written computer programs at the time of his death, 1955, and most had backgrounds in numerical analysis, and computational techniques. Programs were written in machine code in ...
- 700
4
votes
Origin of O/L for false/true in German computer-science texts
Likely relevant resources are Konrad Zuse, "Der Computer ― Mein Lebenswerk" (Springer, Berlin 1984) and Raúl Rojas (ed.), "Die Rechenmachinen Konrad Zuses" (Springer, Berlin 1998). F.L. Bauer, H. ...
- 7,279
4
votes
Accepted
When did the study of the rate of convergence of algorithms begin?
Rate of convergence estimates are typically not counted as estimating complexity of algorithms because the relation between number of steps in them and computational complexity is not very ...
- 80k
4
votes
Accepted
How did Yao come up with his minimum spanning tree algorithm?
I don't have a fully satisfactory answer, but maybe this helps.
First one should note that Tarjan came up with an $O(m \log \log n)$-algorithm roughly at the same time. It's in this technical report:
...
- 56
4
votes
Accepted
What is Holon Programming?
Here is a typeset version of the 1973 Holon Programming: A Survey, prefaced with a letter to the author from Knuth. As the letter suggests, skip straight to the "Program Example" to see what ...
- 56
4
votes
Accepted
Where does the term "pivot" come from in the quicksort algorithm?
Wegner writes of "pivot element" that partitions the array in Sorting a linked list with equal keys (1982), while none of his references (Sedgewick, Rivest, Loeser, Motzkin) does, as far as ...
- 80k
4
votes
How the present technology influences the way history of science is done?
It helped lead to the discovery of the wrong widely used image for the mathematician Legendre. See https://www.ams.org/notices/200911/rtx091101440p.pdf.
- 5,869
4
votes
Accepted
From where did the term "context-free" originate?
In the following paper, Chomsky announced the new nomenclature:
Chomsky, N. (1959). A note on phrase structure grammars. Information
and control, 2(4), 393-395.
In Chomsky (1959)$^1$ a class of ...
- 3,149
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