Name: Ideas That Created the Future
ISBN: 9780262045308

Ideas That Created the Future

Classic papers by thinkers ranging from from Aristotle and Leibniz to Norbert Wiener and Gordon Moore that chart the evolution of computer science. Ideas That Created the Future collects forty-six classic papers in computer science that map the evolution of the field. It covers all aspects of computer science: theory and practice, architectures and algorithms, and logic and software systems, with an emphasis on the period of 1936-1980 but also including important early work. Offering papers by thinkers ranging from Aristotle and Leibniz to Alan Turing and Nobert Wiener, the book documents the discoveries and inventions that created today's digital world. Each paper is accompanied by a brief essay by Harry Lewis, the volume's editor, offering historical and intellectual context.

What Hacker News says

jlduggerJan 2025

If this is up your alley, Ideas That Created the Future[1] has like 40 more, decent introductions to their ideas, and provides a sort of thematic throughline from Aristotle to the modern computer science.

[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045308/ideas-that-created-th...

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turingbookJan 2025

See also the book or the course by Harry R. Lewis at Harvard:

- Ideas That Created the Future https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp...

- "Classics of CS" https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/34992/assignments/syllabu...

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syndicatedjellyJun 2024

Check out Harry Lewis’s “Ideas that Created the Future”

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syndicatedjellyJun 2024

Ideas that Created the Future by Harry Lewis has been a great read, I highly recommend it. It is a book full of the most influential papers for the field of computer science, according to the author. The author is a professor of computer science. He does a great job placing each paper in context and history, as well as explaining any dated concepts that modern developers aren't necessarily familiar with.

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jlduggerAug 2023

For just getting started I recommend collections:

1. Ideas That Created The Future[1]. It's a collection of fiftyish classic CS papers, with some commentary.

2. Wikipedia's list[2].

3. Test of Time awards[3]. These are papers that have been around for a while and people still think are important.

4. Best paper awards[4]. Less useful than ToT as not every best paper is actually that good or important, and sometimes the award committees can't see past names or brands for novel research.

5. Survey Journals[5]. Students often get their research started with a literature review and some go the extra step to collect dozens of papers into a summary paper. I subscribe to the RSS feed for that one, and usually one or two are interesting enough to read.

6. Citation mining -- As you read all these, consider their citation list as potential new reading material, or if an old paper leaves you wanting more, use Google Scholar to find a papers that cited what you just read.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...

[3]: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/test-of-time-awards

[4]: https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/

[5]: https://dl.acm.org/journal/csur

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jlduggerJul 2023

Oh, and one book I rather enjoyed was Ideas That Created the Future, which is not exactly a textbook (but is probably used by the author as such) so much as a survey on the history of computer science via primary sources. Each source has a 1-2 page summary providing context, but the meat is reading the original papers on computer design, Complexity Theory, various papers on logic and proofs and proofs of software properties, theorem provers, NP completeness, neural networks, etc.

One thing I learned is that the idea of a computational neural network predates actual working general purpose computers by a few years, and is actually cited in the construction of computers as an inspiration.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5003/Ideas-That-C...

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