173
Views
1
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Who's bigger? Where computer scientists really rank

Pages 257-264 | Published online: 16 May 2017
 

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 Citation2013), 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].

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 61.00 Add to cart

Issue Purchase

  • 30 days online access to complete issue
  • Article PDFs can be downloaded
  • Article PDFs can be printed
USD 185.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.