Computer Science Gets Noted

Cropped from BBC source

Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace will be reunited. Their work on designing and programming a computing device, a century before any machine was built, is being honored by their appearance on the reverse of the 5-pound note in a new series authorized by the Bank of England. Royal Statistical Society Fellow Florence Nightingale will appear on the 10, EDSAC creator Maurice Wilkes on the 20, and Alan Turing on the 50.

Today, April 1, we are delighted to convey this news and show previews of the banknotes.

We have mentioned Babbage and Lovelace several times on this blog, the latter first here. Our 2015 post on her work on his project sought to engage a scholarly consensus that tends to minimize it. We argue that it should be judged on the plane of a doctoral or masters advisory relationship. Our point is that she greatly amplified the technical content of his work as shown to the scientific community.

The design shown above makes a leap from their Victorian world to our online age. Being “online” back then probably meant being reached by the new railroad system centered on London. The one indelible connection between our world and theirs is shown by the obverse of the banknote: both worlds have a long-serving British queen.

Nightingale On The 10

Besides a long life (1820–1910), Nightingale has a long entry as a founder of statistics. Her actions and influence extended for more than five decades after her iconic “Lady With the Lamp” ministry to soldiers of the Crimean War depicted on the 10-pound note:

Nightingale 200 Years source

The picture at right is based on a photo by William Kilburn, one of few series of photos she allowed to be taken. We have not found a definitive word on what she is holding—not even from this long article—but we would like to believe it is a letter or paper regarding medical practice. Already in 1854, the Oxford Chronicle and Reading Gazette noted her bringing much more than a lamp:

In a knowledge of the ancient languages and of the higher branches of mathematics, in general art, science, and literature, her attainments are extraordinary. There is scarcely a modern language which she does not understand; and she speaks French, German, and Italian as fluently as her native English.

Not only did she popularize the pie chart and invent other statistical visualization techniques, she was among the first people, period, to bring statistical inference into policy. This included demonstrating with data the higher exposure of nurses to multiple diseases among those they tended. She was inducted into the Royal Statistical Society in 1858.

Her medical conduct principles have been applied expressly during the pandemic, as recognized by the time of the 200th anniversary of her birth last May 12, and field hospitals in the UK for Covid-19 treatment are named for her. Her recognition on the currency was considered a way to honor first-line caregivers and was a unanimous vote of the Bank of England commission. It has the earliest release date of all the banknotes.

Wilkes On The 20

Maurice Wilkes had an even longer life, 1913 to 2010. This marks a stark contrast to Turing. Wilkes was the second winner, in 1967, of the Turing Award. The Turing Award citation said he was

“the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program.”

He was thus the first realizer of the full vision of Babbage and Lovelace, although many claim the stored-program distinction for the Manchester Baby one year earlier, in 1948.

There was controversy about the order of him and Turing. The banknotes were intended to go in chronological order. Turing’s famous paper conceiving the computer dates to 1936–37. Wilkes’s first brush with the project that became the EDSAC came in 1945, when he spent an iconic 24 hours with a loaned copy of John von Neumann’s First EDVAC Report that he was not able to mimeograph. However, Wilkes was involved with analog computing devices before 1937 and his EDSAC reached full operation in May 1949, whereas Turing’s own main project, the ACE, launched its pilot version only in 1950.

The ultimate determiner was that the 20-pound note was already recently revised to feature the artist Joseph Turner in February 2020. The Turner issue will have a five-year term, so Wilkes will appear in 2025. The banknote design has not yet been executed.

Turing On The 50

Of course, this is the highlight for us, and we are delighted to be able to show the Turing design in full glory. It was formally unveiled last week:

Belfast Telegraph source

The Pilot ACE machine is shown overlaid with Turing machine code from his 1936 paper. Turing tapes with binary code appear in three places. The big one represents his June 23, 1912 birth date—exactly how, we leave as a puzzle. We’ll just hint that all our friends across the Pond write dates differently from how we do. The new banknotes are being released on Turing’s birthday this coming June.

The GCHQ, which grew out of Turing’s employers at Bletchley Park, has just released its own puzzle challenge, which references Easter-egg features of the Turing banknote. The binary code puzzle is 11th of 12, but to our surprise, when you click it, it gives the answer to the birth date part right away. Then it proceeds to something far more cryptic—well, it’s from GCHQ after all.

Other Notes

The Turing release will also complete the conversion from paper to polymer of all Bank of England notes, which are also the only series issued for Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland issue their own pound-denominated banknotes with different designs. They have yet to convert to polymer, and that will delay any consideration of adopting the new series.

Turing’s family on his father’s side came from Scotland, so there is some sentiment for the Royal Bank of Scotland adopting the design. There is also discussion of recognizing Robin Milner and/or Donald Michie, though both were born in England.

Over in Ireland, both sides of the Northern Ireland border are considering the statistician William Gosset, who as Head Brewer of Guinness over a century ago conceived the Student t-test among many innovations. However, Gosset was also born in England. The Bushmills distillery in Northern Ireland has already appeared on their 5-pound note.

In fact, Gosset and Milner and Michie were all originally nominated alongside Turing for the 50-pound note. We spot Bertrand Russell and William Tutte and Karen Spärck-Jones on the list. In physics, we notice Paul Dirac and John Bell and Stephen Hawking, and also the astronomer Vera Rubin—who was only American, no? Bell was from Northern Ireland.

Sir Michael Atiyah is not on the list because he was living at the time—no living person other than the monarch may appear on a banknote. This law does not apply to e-currency however, and this leads to what for us is the most exciting aspect of the Bank of England initiative.

Semi-Fungible Tokens

The following is a GLL exclusive. It was conveyed to us by Dr. Lofa Polir, who since our story a year ago has resided in England. It comes from a confluence of several facts:

• National banks regularly issue limited editions of currency apart from the main series.
• Government banks have largely refrained from direct involvement with digital currencies, but observe them closely.
• Large sections of the public have come to ascribe intrinsic value to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which come with a blockchain-verifiable certificate of unique ownership.
• A non-fungible token by-definition cannot be used as money but only bought and sold as a (unique) commodity.
• Playing cards in games such as Magic: the Gathering are regularly traded online to the extent of melding with cryptocurrencies or verging on being currency themselves.

The Bank of England recently voted to create an active response to this situation: the semi-fungible token (SFT). Like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, SFTs limit their supply, but unlike them, SFTs are maintained by a central body and backed by its assets. An SFT is fungible by dint of having a fixed redemption rate to standard currency, but its own price may go higher. As with NFTs, each SFT is associated to a piece of digital artwork.

The new issues are based on the Royal Mail’s 2015 Inventive Britain collection, whose honorees include Sir Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web. The main stamps were abstract, but associated issues are not subject to the law against likenesses of living persons:

Composite of src1, src2

Berners-Lee will be the first honoree in the SFT series. We are not authorized to reveal the art design before its release. But Lofa sent us a list of nominees that includes Geoffrey Hinton, Tony Hoare, and Leslie Valiant on the CS side, plus David Spiegelhalter and Demis Hassabis in data science. Unlike with the banknotes, the Bank of England can “catch them all.” Imagine, then, you will soon be able to pay for groceries with cards of some of your favorite computer and data scientists—at least if they are British and you buy the groceries in Britain.

Open Problems

If you see a market for NFTs, do you see one for SFTs—or are they both April Fools?

[added a sentence to the description of SFTs.]