Math Anxiety: Why Hollywood Makes Robots of Alan Turing and Other Geniuses

So much wrong there. Polish cryptographers broke Enigma, and built the first "bombe", a key-testing machine. Turing figured out how to speed up the process, at a cost in wiring complexity. Turing never "built a programmable machine", although he conceptualized one. Flowers designed Colossus, which wasn't a general purpose computer, just an electronic key-tester, like a Bitcoin mining ASIC. At Bletchly Park, Turing was part of a team headed by Dilly Knox, working with John Jeffreys and Peter Twinn.

There's a forgotten history of electronic digital non-general-purpose computing devices: Teleregister (stock quotes), International Totalizator (racetracks), and Reservisor (airline reservations). The WWII cryptanalysis machines, and the ENIAC, all belong to that category. Programming of those involved big plugboards, not loading memory with a program. That sort of thing disappeared in the 1970s, as CPUs became cheaper. (It's back, with FPGAs and ASICs used for high-performance special purpose tasks like packet routing.)

The real inventor of the modern computer was John von Neumann, who's never had a movie about him. He's the one who insisted that random access memory, with both code and data in the same memory, was the way to go, and that computers should work in binary. His 1946 paper (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall12/cos375/Bu...) describes most of basic computer architecture, and will look very familiar to anyone who knows how a simple CPU works. In his spare time, he did some design work on the implosion system for the first atomic bomb, and, using an early computer he designed, the EDSAC, some of the design work for the H-bomb. Also lots of good papers on math and quantum mechanics. Von Neumann was a party guy, known for his dinner parties at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Married twice, divorced once. Not much angst in his life; he was a cheerful sort and had a good life. Died young, in 1957 at age 53, so he didn't get to see the computer era really take off.

Even less well known is the inventor of modern cryptanalysis, William F. Friedman. Friedman turned cryptanalysis from a guessing game to a number-crunching problem. He headed the effort that broke the Japanese "Purple" code, a tougher job than Enigma. Much of the theory behind cryptanalysis is his work. The auditorium at NSA headquarters is named after him. He was a military officer in WWI, married once. Famous quote: "No new cypher is worth looking at unless it comes from someone who has broken a very hard one." Friedman really did break some major cyphers on his own.

Neither von Neumann nor Friedman had unusual personal lives, so they don't have movies. Both were probably smarter than Turing.

They can't seem to imagine a world where its hard work that actually pays off.

The plot of "Avatar" was depressingly cliche; a standard retelling of the standard action movie plot, done once again. The special effects made it worth seeing, twice for me. Rarely does a movie rise above such things.

http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp/...