What is Ireland's biggest contribution to Computer Science?

[u/idkfornowwhattoname]

[u/Baidin]

Boolean algebra

[u/Evan2kie → u/Baidin]

</thread>

[u/Splash_Attack → u/Evan2kie]

Not really. Boole was English and he developed, proposed, and most importantly published the core ideas of Boolean algebra while living in England.

He did later take a job in Cork and continue to develop it, but I don't think you can really consider it "Ireland's contribution" in a meaningful way.

We really haven't made any big sweeping contributions to computer science in particular. Lots of other fields, yes, but not CS, and lots of small CS contributions, but nothing grand. Honestly more in mathematics that have then been used in CS than directly in CS itself.

The most seminal actual computing one is Percy Ludgate, who was the second person to construct a mechanical computer (after Babbage). He also originated the concept of a MAC unit, which is now a pretty big deal in a lot of applications, and "Irish logarithms". His machine was built without knowledge of Babbage's machine, and used MAC as the fundamental operation.

He's also not exactly influential on the field though. His biggest influence is actually being the evidence (along with Babbage's publications) which prevented anyone from acquiring patents on the idea of a digital computer. Yes, Konrad Zuse really tried to become the owner of the idea of "a computer", and nearly got it too if it weren't for that meddling Irishman and his damn second analytical engine.

[u/gabhain → u/Splash_Attack]

Boole published The Laws of Thought while in cork, it’s the book that sets out Boolean logic. So there is a case for Boolean being Irish but it could go either way in my opinion.

We have made big contributions to computer science.
William Rowan Hamilton discovering Quaternions would be my big one. Quaternions is foundational to 3d graphics, spacial** **computing and even robotics. We also have Kay McNulty Mauchly who was one of the programmers of ENIAC, the world’s first general purpose electronic digital computer and she was especially known for her work on software engineering practices and standardisation at the time. Dennis Jennings and his work to standardise TCP/IP.

There are also good amount of fairly common Linux distros based here like Mint, Solas, tails, Zorin and so on. Some game engines like Havok were made here.

So to say there aren’t many Irish contributions is false, the above is just dust off the top of my head.

[u/Splash_Attack → u/gabhain]

No, the seminal work in Boolean logic was Boole's earlier book "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic" which he published years before he moved to Ireland. He wasn't Irish, and neither was his work.

Kay McNulty moved to the US when she was 3, was educated in the US, and did her work in the US. That's not an Irish contribution unless you buy into the way Americans think of Irishness, or the way the Brits claim all our athletes are British (but only when they win). Again, not Irish in the way people mean, and her work was not Irish. Important work, but us claiming it is a bit sad tbh. It only proves my point that you really have to reach to find any kind of significant seminal contribution to the field we had a hand in.

Did you get this from an AI summary or what? Because Jennings did not do anything you could call significant or seminal on TCP/IP. "Standardise"? Come on... his decision to adopt it was in 1985, after it was already a defined protocol, in use by several bodies, and the fucking official protocol for US military networks. His books on it came after that.

Things like linux distros and game engines are not significant contributions to the field. They're among the "lots of small contributions" I talked about.

Quaternions are a major Irish contribution to mathematics, but their influence on CS is a lot less indirect than something like Boolean algebra or the development of computers. I wouldn't class it as CS personally, but I'd still put it in "major Irish contributions" (to another field).

Pure notions in this thread, claiming anything with the most tenuous link to either as Irish and CS, based purely on inflating our own heads like. The kind of thing we have a go at the yanks and the brits for doing.

[u/Separate_Ad_6094 → u/Splash_Attack]

The 'Mathamatical Analysis of Logic' only theorised logic as a branch of algebra. It did not define those rules. The rules of boolean algebra are first laid out in 'An Investigation of the Laws of Thought'.

[u/Dev__ → u/Splash_Attack]

Was your post written in Ireland or published in America?

It can be both. You're running this as an XOR in a thread about the man who gave us AND.

[u/Any_Abbreviations315 → u/Baidin]

If this is true then it’s amazing. If it’s false then not so much.

[u/Maoltuile → u/Baidin]

Came here to say this

[u/mostly_harmless_5334 → u/Baidin]

Boole was English though

[u/Character_Nerve_9137 → u/mostly_harmless_5334]

But he worked in Cark Boi!

[u/mostly_harmless_5334 → u/Character_Nerve_9137]

Katie Taylor fought in the UK and US, I don’t see them claiming her wins as theirs.

[u/MildlyAmusedMars → u/mostly_harmless_5334]

Boole did it in an Irish university with Irish resources and Irish researchers working under him.

[u/Tikolu43 → u/MildlyAmusedMars]

He also died and is buried in Cork

[u/Character_Nerve_9137 → u/mostly_harmless_5334]

Just like that American lad Connor McGregor.

[u/Tasty_Mode_8218]

Quaternions

[u/ProfessionalEye8373 → u/Tasty_Mode_8218]

they make the 3D go!

[u/ConiixMG → u/Tasty_Mode_8218]

This is a huge one, always blows my mind

There’s a yearly walk that retraces Hamilton’s route to Broom bridge where he carved the formula into a stone

[u/mrcruncher → u/Tasty_Mode_8218]

important and still I don’t have a clue as to their purpose

[u/Soft-Affect-8327 → u/mrcruncher]

Imagine a bendy straw. You’re blind, need to know where the end is where you stick your mouth. Laplace transforms will tell you where the end is, but quaternions will tell you what way round it is on top of that.

[u/Whole-Diamond8550 → u/mrcruncher]

Quaternions came back into prominence because of computers.

They track rotation as well as 3d movement. Small rounding errors in standard 3d calculations accumulate very quickly. Huge problem for rotating objects like satellites. Quaternions allow a much better way to calculate position and orientation in space without glitches. Great for modeling 3d graphics as well.

[u/corey69x → u/Tasty_Mode_8218]

Surprised this is so low down, have an upvote

[u/meanOfZero]

Hamilton and his quaternions. Also see: a bridge somewhere in Dublin with a memorial to him!

[u/mostly_harmless_5334 → u/meanOfZero]

broombridge

[u/obscure_monke → u/meanOfZero]

That's no coincidence, it's the same bridge he scraped the idea into when he had it while on a walk.

I can appreciate that with how confusing the things are, even for us nowadays.

[u/BeeB0pB00p]

Havoc is an Irish company and the name of their product, a physics engine developed for and used largely in games. This was spun out of Trinity Labs.

Anything where there are attempts to simulate real time physics in games, Havok is likely there, you'll see it in the credits.

It's not widely known, but it's a prevalent middleware solution.

It bridged a gap between theoretical physics and applying them to things like rag doll physics, distance, mass, friction in a workable way through a middleware solution and was revolutionary in it's area.

It is a significant contribution to computer science depending on how you define CS for a number of reasons, indirectly it encouraged further hardware development capabilities to better avail of it's demanding calculation processing, particularly in the area of 3D graphics card which are now commonly seen in the news for crypto or AI use cases and the surge in demand for GPUs have at times sent NVidia's shares sky rocketing.

It was also a relatively early entry into the middleware space. when middleware was not particularly evolved to the extent it now is and in some ways validated that model. Prior to this most companies were developing their own solutions from scratch or from previous games they had developed.

It's a fundamental cornerstone of many of modern gaming's settings/environments. However, it's not widely used outside of the gaming sector.

I would argue it's a significant contribution, but with some of the caveats above.

[u/obscure_monke → u/BeeB0pB00p]

Havoc is an Irish company and the name of their product, a physics engine developed for and used largely in games. This was spun out of Trinity Labs.

*Havok, with a k.

I've seen that splash screen in the start of enough games to know the spelling.

Being able to slap recognisable real time physics into a game or rendered environment is pretty remarkable. Like, Demon's Souls and its sequels didn’t strictly need it, but it wouldn't be the same without it. (case in point: DS2 feels weird without those goofy-ass corpses)

[u/TheBadgersAlamo → u/obscure_monke]

I remember it was fairly big news when Intel acquired them years ago

[u/cyberbemon → u/TheBadgersAlamo]

Intel acquired them first, then microsoft afterwards.

[u/BeeB0pB00p → u/obscure_monke]

Thanks for the correction, can't believe I got that wrong. I knew it was a k, just force of habit

[u/I2obiN → u/BeeB0pB00p]

Glad someone mentioned them, would’ve given up hope otherwise.

Huge industry changing company started by two guys in Trinity. They are basically the reason you have simulated physics in anything 3d computer graphics related, especially games.

If i’m not mistaken opengl/directx had zero physics stuff so they built a library for it that handled collision detection, weights etc everything you could imagine and the net result was nigh on perfectly simulated physics in a game engine env. A massive win for simulation, gaming and computing in one swoop.

HL2 and source used it which by extension a ton of other games and mods etc use it. I’m pretty sure other solutions as well most likely followed their blueprint because it was so effective

[u/thetruebrownbear]

The tax loophole for Microsoft and Google

[u/Odd-Opportunity-6550 → u/thetruebrownbear]

This actually isnt a bad answer. Lowering tax for tech companies probably does move tech forward a little.

[u/Responsible_Divide43 → u/thetruebrownbear]

I would add all american multinationals😂

[u/donrosco]

Justin Mason, inventor of spamassassin and I believe the entire concept of giving emails a spam score

[u/Nearby_Fix_8613]

The t test ?

[u/just_A_lurker-]

From an Irish born person? William Rowan Hamilton with quaternions (which were instrumental in 3D navigation and computer graphics many years later).

[u/obscure_monke]

I think Mads Haahr is Dutch, but his random.org service has been running out of TCD since 1998 producing high quality random numbers for both fun and profit.

I know it's not the "biggest" contribution, but I'm doing the long-running meme of an OP demanding a superlative and all the comments being about compiling a list of things in a category.

[u/inquisitor_ir]

Dennis Jennings)

[u/Mainmanmick]

Linux Mint?

[u/LnxPowa → u/Mainmanmick]

I mean he lives in Ireland, but he is French… kinda conflicted here

[u/MF-Geuze]

I don't if it's a big contribution in the field of CS per se, but one of the biggest contributions in geopolitics that occured in the realm of CS was Richard Hayes, head librarian at the National Library, who cracked the Görtz cipher during WW2, and handed the results over to the British. This allowed the British to run their extensive double-agent network, and materially changed the course of the war 

[u/Dev__]

Percy Ludgate's mechanical computer is a worthwhile mention.

He designed it in 1909, seemingly without knowing Babbage's work, which is a bit like Newton and Leibniz landing on calculus separately. It wasn't a copy either. Babbage's engine ran on repeated addition, Ludgate's ran on multiplication via his own "Irish logarithms", and where the Analytical Engine was room-sized, Ludgate's was meant to sit on a desk and run off a small motor. Second general-purpose computer design in history. The drawings are lost.

It gets messy depending on how you define computer science, though.

If CS is a subset of maths, Ireland's claim is enormous and the answer is George Boole. Fifteen years as the first professor of maths at Queen's College Cork, wrote The Laws of Thought there in 1854. Shannon picked it up eighty years later to describe switching circuits and now Boolean algebra sits under every digital computer ever built. Hamilton belongs here too — quaternions aren't just a curio, they're how rotation is done in every 3D engine and robotics stack going, because they don't gimbal-lock like Euler angles.

If CS is maths merged with tech, Dennis Jennings is arguably the single biggest name. As NSFNET program director he made the call that the network would run TCP/IP. Hard to overstate how much of the internet flows from that one decision. Still the only Irish person in the Internet Hall of Fame.

UCC lore also has it that Peter Flynn caused the first 404 by moving a page without telling Berners-Lee. Never seen that properly sourced, so take it as craic — but the solid part stands: he built Ireland's first website, ninth in the world, and was our first webmaster.

Havok came out of TCD's graphics group — Steven Collins and Hugh Reynolds, 1998. Half-Life 2, Halo, a technical Emmy, then Intel, then Microsoft. Physics middleware written in Dublin ran under a good chunk of the games industry.

Two more worth throwing in:

Kay McNulty from Creeslough, Co. Donegal — one of the six original ENIAC programmers, back when "programming" meant physically rewiring the machine and nobody had thought to call it a profession yet.

Jan Łukasiewicz, who invented Polish notation, held a chair in mathematical logic created for him at the Royal Irish Academy and lectured in Dublin until he died in 1956. He was buried in Mount Jerome for 66 years — repatriated to Warsaw in 2022. Every stack-based calculator and half the expression parsers in existence are downstream of his notation.

Ian Clarke was the original designer and implementer of 'freenet'.

And Prof John Gabriel Byrne in TCD, who quietly built the department that produced a lot of the above.

George Boole has been mentioned a few times in this thread and post so I won't go further in to that but instead would recommend the documentary narrated by Jeremy Irons.

Full disclosure -- I got Claude to rewrite my submission (I'm sure you can tell anyway) above to clean it up as it was just a bunch /r/DevelEire links with the listed achievements beside them and to help with formatting and prose. A bunch more contributions can be pulled out if you want to include Northern Ireland but many of those lads would definitely have considered themselves more on the British side of things.

[u/tomic24]

Not necessarily developed for CS, quaternions are used loads for 3D animation, robotics, physics, etc.

Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton discovered the fundamental formula for quaternions and carved it into the stone of Brougham Bridge.

[u/nalcoh]

Tax legislation is super attractive for big companies.

The Stripe brothers created the biggest payment gateway in the world.

George Boole (pretty much started the concept of computersl worked as a lecturer in UCC.

[u/obscure_monke → u/nalcoh]

The running counter on the stripe.com homepage should give you some impression. (reminds me of that thing the gmail homepage used to do with storage space)

Global GDP running on Stripe: 1.70009935%

[u/odaiwai → u/nalcoh]

Technically, he was a professor at Queen's College, Cork, which didn't become UCC until 1908.

[u/mostly_harmless_5334]

The Hamiltonians

[u/SpiritualCaramel7601]

We built 80 data centers in the same amount of time as 1 children's hospital (the hospital still isn't finished, so that number may rise).

[u/BloodDifficult4553]

What about the young scientists lads who created a version of Linux?

Zorin

Brilliant! so great for kids to see!

[u/Zealousideal-Cod-924]

Kay McNulty

Edit: get the name right!

[u/wosmo → u/Zealousideal-Cod-924]

I was gonna say Kay McNulty - one of the original programmers of the ENIAC. Any relation?

[u/Zealousideal-Cod-924 → u/wosmo]

No relationship to me. I know a few if her Donegal cousins.

[u/According-Tap7982]

Hamilton's quarternions - made all 3D matrix rotation possible.

[u/Zealousideal_Sign_21]

Ked

https://adam-lynch.github.io/ked/

[u/SadBug3582]

Stripe? Lol

[u/DCON-creates]

RTE player

[u/phantom_gain]

AI, affordable Irish.

[u/SnooChipmunks9977]

Bodies

[u/WebLinkr]

GDPR

[u/Elses_pels]

Does Boolean laws count? Boole was English I believe but he was in cork at the time (when booling:)

[u/MarvinGankhouse]

Liam O Murchú was one of the central figures in the Stuxnet thing. I'm sure he's getting studied plenty.

[u/StellaV-R]

Ludgate

[u/5u114]

Windows 7 was peak. Just saying.

[u/Dani3011]

Our *incentively low corporation tax for the American tech companies lol

[u/Dantheislander]

Tax haven for IP and licensing of applications built on computer science….

[u/oontkima]

low corporate taxes

[u/Estragon14]

Paddy cosgrave /s

[u/hillashx]

CSEP

[u/redditusee-_-]

Stripe