I am willing to grant you that a random person off the street is more likely to have heard of Turing than Shannon. But much more likely still to have heard of Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or James Watson.
Public awareness of scientists drops off very quickly. That’s just the way life works. It’s lucky enough if random people off the street have heard of small countries or political leaders of their own country. Most people don’t remember most of the major genocides of the past few decades.
Shannon is without question one of the best known (by the general public) 30 or 50 scientists of the 20th century. It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him. At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea.
But not everyone can capture the public imagination the way (say) Einstein did.
> It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him.
> At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea.
You've berated the parent for saying - obviously figuratively - "nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him", then conceded that having a STEM degree would make a significant difference to the likelihood of whether someone knows of him.
It's a benign thing to trigger such an outburst, especially given there's so little substantive difference between your positions.
For what it's worth, I'm a self-taught software developer of 15+ years' experience and I've consumed plenty of material about science and scientific history - but without any academic STEM study.
I hadn't heard of him - at least to the extent that I remember.
Whereas of course I know plenty about Turing.
And for what it's worth I know much more of Turing's life than Hawking's, Goodall's or Watson's.
The question of how many non-CS/STEM-qualified people have heard about him is an interesting one to explore, and it can do without the poisonous tone you've introduced.
There are thousands of important mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists, etc. languishing in obscurity who don’t get the credit they deserve.
Shannon, as one of the best known and most celebrated scholars (in any field) of the 20th century, and by any reasonable standard a scientific superstar, is not one of them.
It’s like saying “Le Corbusier doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Nobody outside architecture has heard of him. Everyone knows Frank Lloyd Wright, but what about Le Corbusier?!” Or “Carl Jung doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Nobody outside of psychiatry has heard of him. Everyone knows Sigmund Freud, but what about Jung?!”
Pick whatever field you want, and I’m sure you can find a list of seminal figures who are well known to anyone with basic knowledge of the field (say, anyone who took an intro course in college) and familiar to anyone with broad cultural education, but not as recognizable to the man on the street as top athletes or rock stars. Claiming that these people are unrecognized or unheard of is absurd.
Your comparison to Freud and Jung refutes the very point you're trying to make.
I have approximately the same (quite high) level of lay-person interest in psychology as I do in science, and I know more about Jung than I do about Freud.
On Jung's Wikipedia page, the "In Popular Culture" section contains 19 items. Freud's page doesn't have such a section - though of course he is still very well known in the mainstream, but not materially more so than Jung.
Turing's "Portrayal" section on his Wikipedia page contains 14 items across theatre, literature, music and film. No comparable section exists for Shannon, and you couldn't create one that would come close to Turing's.
This is all that your parent was trying to say. Not that Shannon is unrecognised within his field or "less recognizable to the man on the street as top athletes or rock stars", but less recognised in mainstream culture than fellow computer scientist Alan Turing.
Returning to your original comment:
> Yeah! Nobody has heard of that guy. His Mathematical Theory of Communication only has 112 thousand (!!!) google scholar citations, apparently the #4 most cited paper of all time in any field (#1–3, 5–9 are biochem/chem papers, and #10 is clinical psych).
> For comparison, Turing has 5 papers with 10–12k citations each.
The _entire point_ your parent was trying to make was that Shannon is vastly more credentialed and recognized within his field, yet little known in the mainstream.
Why get so worked up over a point on which there's basically no substantive disagreement?
It's probably the case that there are no scientists besides maybe Einstein (E = mc^2) and Newton (apple falling from the tree -> gravity) that the general public would be able to identify by name and refer to one thing that very roughly approximates what they did.
Who knows though, given the public's enthusiasm for modern tech and its stars (Jobs, Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc.) maybe one day scientists' work might make a "Casey's Top 40"-like popular countdown if presented the right way!
Your comment proves my point. Shannon made greater contribution than Turing. But everyone knows Turing. There are movies made about him.
When I said "people", I thought it was obvious I meant the general public.