Turing Award： History & Enlightenment

The presentation of Turing Award history, from one perspective, presents the development of computer science and technology. Moreover, the spirit of Turing Award winners always gives us a lot of helpful enlightenment. Aimed at the Turing Award winners between 1966 and 2016, this paper firstly performs statistics and analyzes of the related data, including their nationality, education background, universities. Then from their growth process and growth environment, we probe into the talents’ growth rules and innovation education experiences, and reveals the advanced idea and education method of higher education in western developed countries which may provide beneficial enlightenment to the higher computer science education in our country.

Nationality statistics of the winners

Fig. 1 The nationality statistics of the Turing award winners

As can be seen from Fig. 1, Among the 64 winners, there were the most American scientists, a total of 49 people, accounting for 76.56% of the total number of winners, followed by British scientists, a total of 5 people, and a few scholars from Netherlands, Canada, India, China, Norway, Israel, Denmark, France and other countries. The growth of scientists is closely related to factors such as the socioeconomic, political, cultural environment and the overall level of development of science and technology.

Bachelor’s major statistics of the winners

Bar graph. 2 First degree of the Turing award winners
From bar graph 2, we can see that among the 64 winners, 53% of the winners were mathematics, followed by 16% of physics and 19% of electrical engineering and computer science. In fact, it is easy understanding that mathematics is the foundation of computer science. It provides the most important discipline thought and discipline methodology foundation of computer science. Therefore, people with deep mathematical knowledge are more likely to make breakthroughs in the field of computer science. Physics and electronic technology also provide technology and methods for computer science. People with physical or electrical engineering and related science and technology backgrounds are more likely to succeed in the field of computer technology.

Final educational statistics of the winners

Bar chart. 3 The last degree of the Turing award winners
From bar chart. 3, we can see that 42% of the winners are math major, followed by 40% of electrical engineering or computer science, and 9% of physics majors.
At the same time, there are few winners of the computer science specialty. The reason for this can be summarized as the following two points: Firstly, computer science is an emerging discipline, which is only more than half a century, and computer science college established time compared with other subjects to be late, and contribute to the establishment and development of Computer Science in the process of more people from other related majors; Secondly, computer science is a cross discipline, it is based on mathematical theory, and also relates to the physics and Electronic Science and technology and other disciplines, the knowledge structure of the computer science is difficult to support the needs of the entire computer science innovation.

The enlightenment from the winners

1.  High quality professional education and good research environment.
2.  Good at thinking, work hard.
3.  Good at discovering your interest, and be passionate about your choice
4.  A strong sense of thinking, imagination, and keen observation
5.  Have good communication ability and cooperation ability.