Abstract
We consider the emergence of ‘notables’ within the disciplines of the modern university, the foremost among whom may be selected to appear on postage stamps. Noting that disciplinary culture is as important as content in university education, we suggest that some knowledge of the identity of these notables, passed on by encultured tutors, should be part of it. We observe that notability means different things to different communities, and may arise by some form of nomination or emergence, and in the latter case case may not coincide with formal lists of prizewinners. We illustrate with two case studies of disciplinary communities being polled for views of who occupies their pantheon.
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Notes
Fermi also used this power in influencing Italian Computer Science: see (inter alia): http://cctld.it/storia/doc/lettera_fermi.htm.
A recent case is the allocation of credit for the solving of the Poincarè conjecture (Nasar and Gruber 2006).
Leading facetiously to Stigler’s Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer (Stigler 1980). Eponymic misattribution is widespread in clinical studies.
Some such were strictly research oriented, for example the British Machine Vision Conference. Others were specifically for Computing educators, such is ACM ITICSE. The poll now remains open generally via the WWW.
Following the top twelve come, in order, McCarthy, Minsky, Codd, Zuse, Torvalds, Brooks, Backus, Church …. Among the also-rans were Shannon, Aristotle, Archimedes, and ‘the Arabs’ (‘for inventing zero’—although many respondents more rightly nominated Al’Khowarizmi).
Following these 12 came Planck, Fermi, Curie (the first female), Bardeen, …
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Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Frank Bott (University of Aberystwyth), Martyn Clark (University of Leeds), Mats Daniels (Uppsala University), Cary Gray (Wheaton College) and Bruce Klein (Grand Valley State University) for providing advice and input to the preparation of this paper. Anonymous referees also commented with clarity and depth on an earlier submission, and thanks are due to them. Some of their lucid observations have—with gratitude—been paraphrased here.
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Boyle, R.D. Whom shall we Put on the Postage Stamps?. Sci & Educ 22, 695–707 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9403-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9403-y