This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a now famous Cambridge and Princeton university educated British mathematician. A century has passed since Turing’s birth, which was the same year (1912) that the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the north Atlantic. A hundred years seems like a very long time, but as I hope you will come to realize from this lecture, we are still working out the deep implications of not just Turing’s insights, but of 2,500 years worth of human thought.
As every computer science student learns, Turing is credited with creating the intellectual foundation of the modern discipline of computer science with his famous 1936 paper that defined the Turing Machine as an abstract model for mathematically capturing the intuitive idea of a computable function. While Turing certainly deserves a lot of credit, his insights were the result of his being able to see further by “standing on the shoulder of giants.” In the 21st century, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, uttered a similar phrase regarding the creation of open source software.
This metaphorical expression, meaning the ability to see farther into the future because of our knowledge of the past, is a paraphrasing of a saying attributed to Isaac Newton in the 17th century, which in turn is a paraphrasing of a 12th century metaphor which an educated person like Newton would have learned from the scholastic-based curriculum of that era at Cambridge university. In Newton’s time, university education was very much still based on the classical Greek natural philosophy of Aristotle and the Roman-Christian Quadrivium curriculum. So Newton, Turing and Torvalds are closely linked by a shared western cultural and scientific tradition that is ancient, but is as alive and well in the 21st century as it was in the 12th.
This lecture will illuminate parts of the rich history of the Art & Science of Computing, which over the past 2,500 years has gradually led to the impact of modern computer and communication technologies that are driving the global economic, political, cultural, and scientific changes we are living through. What I hope this talk will inspire in the audience is a more conscious appreciation for how far we have come culturally and scientifically, but also how far we still have to go in our discipline to reach the future envisioned by the giants of our intellectual heritage.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Greg Lavender holds BS (1983), MS (1988) and PhD (1993) degrees in Computer Science. In 1983, he joined a small team of young network engineers at TRW who together implemented the new TCP/IP protocol suite on an IBM mainframe and Intel 8086 microcomputers, connecting them to the ARPANET. Dr. Lavender has been doing advanced software research and development in networking protocols, operating systems, concurrent programming, and distributed computer systems ever since.
From 1994-1998, Dr. Lavender was co-founder and Chief Scientist of two successful Internet server start-up companies. The last one, Critical Angle, was acquired by Innosoft International, which was founded by three Harvey Mudd College graduates (Kevin Carosso, Ned Freed and Dan Newman). Dr. Lavender was VP of Engineering at Innosoft from 1998 until 2000 when Sun Microsystems acquired Innosoft. Critical Angle and Innosoft engineers authored over 30 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol standards.
Dr. Lavender is currently the Chief Technology Officer for Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering at Citigroup, where he is leading Citi’s global cloud computing program. Prior to Citi, he was VP of Network Software Engineering at Cisco Systems, where he led network operating system and protocol engineering. He previously led several successful software product engineering teams at Sun Microsystems for over a decade, including kernel and network engineering as the VP for Sun’s Solaris core operating systems group.
From 1994-2007, concurrent with his industry career, Dr. Lavender was an adjunct Associate Professor in the CS Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses and supervised several undergraduate and graduate research theses. Dr. Lavender also served a 3-year term as Associate Chairman. He received the College of Natural Sciences 2006 Outreach Award for his leadership in the creation of effective outreach programs for the retention and recruitment of CS majors, especially women given the steep decline in enrollments after 2001.
Dr. Lavender last taught a CS course in 2009 as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford. In 2010, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the CS Department at Virginia Tech in recognition of his industry and academic accomplishments. He had previously received the 2002 Outstanding Alumnus Award from the College of Arts & Sciences for the creation of Internet software that was a practical application of the research ideas in his PhD dissertation, for which he had received a Scholarly Graduate Research Award in 1993.