MIT Crypto Experts Win 2012 Turing Award 32
alphadogg writes "A pair of MIT professors and security researchers whose work paved the way for modern cryptography have been named winners of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award, also known as the 'Nobel Prize in Computing.' Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Silvio Micali, the MIT Ford Professor of Engineering, are recipients of the award, which will be formally presented by the Association for Computing Machinery on June 15 in San Francisco. According to the ACM: 'By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science.' Goldwasser and Micali will split a $250K prize."
Sponsorship (Score:5, Insightful)
The RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Ford Professor of Engineering. Do universities really need money so badly that they have to sell advertising in their faculty position names?
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While this is upsetting at least they haven't gotten to the point of having a Wal-Mart Oncology Department.
It's going to be the Phillip-Morris Department of Oncology. And I hear they are going to discover that cigarettes don't cause cancer after all, it turns out that breathing is the problem.
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Seriously, did you ever sit down, multiply (tuition X students), and think about whether that yields enough money to run a university? If you think it does, you are so far off it isn't even funny.
I went to a school that depends heavily on research grants, yet they haven't named a single professor after a corporation.
It seems that it would get in the way of educational integrity..."Ford Professor of Electrical Engineering finds dangerous flaw in Chevy Volt, assures us that the Ford Ampere has no such problems, and our Energizer Professor of Batteries finds that the Duracell batteries used in the Chevy are substandard".
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These are all started as gifts. Big company gives university megabucks as a gift so that they can fund a professor that deals in an area of interest to the donor (ie, RSA funds cryptography type research). It's not advertisement because the goal is not to turn the students/faculty into customers, otherwise you'd be seeing plenty of endowed chairs at junior colleges.
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Re:Sponsorship (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realise that the practice of naming a chair after the sponsor goes back at least 400 years [wikipedia.org]?
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You think there is quid pro quo in the naming of these two professors?
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Paying 4 Sponsorship is even further out than that (Score:3)
Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more
Obligatory /. pedantry (Score:2)
Hawking is a former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair is currently held by Michael Green.
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The RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Ford Professor of Engineering. Do universities really need money so badly that they have to sell advertising in their faculty position names?
Uhm, endowed positions have been around at universities for, what, a few hundred years at least???
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Yes they do.
Many of these named chairs aren't really advertisements but endowments. It's not like naming a building, in that you still have to name a worthy professor to grant the honor to, and the person making the endowment sometimes has no choice in which professor gets chosen. It would be wonderful if wealthy institutions could endow professorships while remaining anonymous, but that does not mean that non-anonymous stops being a gift and becomes an advert instead.
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