Categories of Turing Award winners
Recently, I was looking through the list of Turing Award winners on Wikipedia. I knocked up a quick mindmap of the winners, categorising them by sub-discipline. To paraphrase George Box, all categorisations are wrong, but some are useful.
What stands out for me in this map is the preponderance of award winners from the areas of programming languages and theoretical computer science. This is understandable in the context of laying the foundations for computing and computer science.
There are very few, however, that could be called application areas. For example, one in graphics for Sutherland, and one in networking for Cerf & Kahn.
There are no awards (yet) in hugely interesting and important areas of computing, such as social networking/web (Tim Berners-Lee a prime candidate, perhaps?), mobile, data-mining, geo-technologies, machine vision, machine translation, massively parallel computing, sensors…….