JEWS IN COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE  

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This section concerns contributions to the development of information science and technology at its logical (as opposed to its hardware) level.  Specifically, this section deals with areas such as computation theory, artificial intelligence, the statistical theories of information, communication, and systems control, cryptography, operations research, computer and network architectures, and algorithm and software design.  The general level of this contribution is reflected in the current ~45% Jewish membership in the Computer and Information Sciences division of the US National Academy of Sciences and in the percentages of Jewish recipients shown below for several of the most prestigious awards in the field.  Two of the four individuals generally recognized to have been the principal architects of the Information Age were the Jewish mathematicians Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann.1
Some of the more notable Jewish contributions are listed below.  (The names of non-Jewish scientists and engineers mentioned in the accompanying discussion have been denoted with the superscript "+" in order to avoid confusion.)
NOTES
1. According to the prominent historian of technology George Dyson, "there were four essential prophets whose mathematics brought us into the Information Age: Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon."  See "The Elegance of Ones and Zeroes," by George Dyson in The Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2017.
2. See  Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, by William Lanouette (Scribner's, New York, 1992, p. 63).

3. See  "Emil Post and His Anticipation of Gödel and Turing," by John Stillwell in Mathematics Magazine (Mathematical Association of America, Washington, DC, Vol. 77, No. 1, Feb. 2004, pp. 3-14).  See also http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Post.html.
4. See "Max Newman: Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer," by William Newman in Colossus: The First Electronic Computer, edited by Jack Copeland (Oxford, Oxford and New York, 2004).
5. Encyclopedia of Computer Science (Fourth Edition), edited by Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly, and David Hemmendinger (Wiley, Chichester, England, 2003, p. 1841).
6. See Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, by George Dyson (Pantheon/Random House, New York, 2012, p. 287).
7. Parallel Supercomputing in SIMD Architectures, by R. Michael Hord (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 1990).
8. Although most supercomputers are now based on MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) architectures, their individual processing nodes generally embody small-scale SIMD capabilities.  The still largely hypothetical quantum computer can be thought of as an SIMD machine with exponentially many virtual processors.
9. See  AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier (Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 26), or Encyclopedia of Computer Science (Fourth Edition), edited by Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly, and David Hemmendinger (Wiley, Chichester, England, 2003, p. 91).
10. The 2019 IEEE Xplore article “Who Is the Father of Deep Learning?” states: “We conclude that Frank Rosenblatt developed and explored all the basic ingredients of the deep learning systems of today, and that he should be recognized as a Father of Deep Learning, perhaps together with Hinton, LeCun and Bengio who have just received the Turing Award as the fathers of the deep learning revolution.”  Lawrence Fogel initiated the field of evolutionary computing in 1960 and is considered to be the “father of evolutionary programming,” the first of four basic approaches that were eventually formulated and subsequently merged into the field of evolutionary computing.
11. See "Marshall Rosenbluth and the Metropolis algorithm," by J. E. Gubernatis, in Physics of Plasmas (12, 057303, 2005).  According to this article, Nicholas Metropolis'+ only contribution to the algorithm's development was making available the use of MANIAC, the Los Alamos computer he had constructed as a replica of the computer that von Neumann designed and built at the Institute for Advanced Study.  Of the other co-authors of the Metropolis algorithm paper, "arguably the most significant publication in the history of computational physics," Mici Teller initiated the assembly language programming work to code the algorithm, Arianna Rosenbluth+ took that over and produced from scratch the actual program used to test the algorithm, Edward Teller made "the crucial suggestion" to employ ensemble, rather than temporal averaging and how to do that, and Marshall Rosenbluth actually designed the algorithm, incorporating insights of his own. According to Gubernatis, the "key," as opposed to the "crucial," idea underpinning the algorithm's power was the principle of detailed balance, which was implicit in the original 1953 paper, but not made explicit until Rosenbluth formulated a general proof of the algorithm's validity in 1956.  Rosenbluth went on to become one of the world's leading plasma theorists and a winner of both the Enrico Fermi Award (1985) and the US National Medal of Science (1997).         
12. See http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Dantzig_George.html.

13. Cooley and Tukey are generally credited with invention of the "modern" FFT.   Their 1965 paper only referenced the prior work of I. J. Good, whose FFT algorithm was both somewhat different and less efficient.  In a January 1992 paper in IEEE SP Magazine, entitled "How the FFT Gained Acceptance," Cooley reviewed other prior work and concluded that "it appears that Lanczos had the FFT algorithm" in 1942.  He holds out the possibility that Gauss may have had it as early 1805, however.  Gauss's work was not published until after his death and was in Latin and employed somewhat archaic notation, which made it difficult to decipher.  It was only published in 1866 in his collected works. An analysis by Michael Heideman, Don Johnson, and C. Sidney Burrus has concluded that Gauss did indeed have the basic elements of the modern FFT in 1805, but due to its obscurity, his formulation appears to have had no influence on subsequent work.  
14. S
ee the next-to-last paragraphs in https://archive.siam.org/news/news.php?id=526 and in the obituary published in the November 2000 issue of Physics Today
(pp. 75-76).  See also the  discussion in the Appendix to Tracking and Kalman Filtering Made Easy, by Eli Brookner (Wiley, New York, 1998, pp. 383-387).
 
Georg Cantor and Herbert Simon had  Jewish fathers; Simon's mother was of partial Jewish descent, which was also the case, at a minimum, for the mother of Georg Cantor.  Max Newman and Vinton Cerf had Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, while Richard Brodie, Wassily Leontief, Yuri Manin, John McCarthy, Larry Page, and Lotfi Zadeh have, or had, Jewish mothers.  For more information, see the footnotes to these and other listings in Jewish Computer and Information Scientists, or in the cases of Leontief and Manin, in Jewish Economists and Jewish Mathematicians, respectively.

+ Non-Jewish.

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