Who's bigger? Where computer scientists really rank

Abstract

We have developed algorithms that measure the relative historical significance of the over 800,000 people appearing in Wikipedia, producing significance rankings that correlate well with a wide variety of validation criteria. In our book Who's bigger?: where historical figures really rank (Skiena and Ward 2013), we use our significance scores to provide insight into a variety of historical and cultural questions.

Here we apply our significance measure to study several issues related to the history and stature of computing. Who are the most historically significant computer scientists? The most significant Turing award winners? The Turing award purports to be the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’, but does the stature of these awards really compare?

Our answers to all these questions prove revealing. To lend credence to our findings, we describe our ranking methodology and validation criteria. Our complete rankings for all historical figures in Wikipedia are available for inspection at http://www.whoisbigger.com.

Acknowledgements

We thank Jack Zheng for his assistance in preparing this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by NSF [Grants IIS-1017181, DBI-1355990, and IIS-1546113].