 BILL: Good news for Jimmy Carter! He won The Betty White Award! (see here).
LANCE: That’s not good news. He had to die to get it.
BILL: Call it a mixed bag. Good news for me, in that I have a famous person for The Betty White award. And I later found out that Manmohan Singh, a former prime minister of India passed away on Dec 26, 2024, so I have two famous people for The Betty White Award.
LANCE: You should change the name to The Jimmy Carter Award. Did Betty White start a Department of Education?
BILL: No can do. What if someone even more famous dies next year. I don’t want to play musical chairs with the name. Past winners were Pele and The Pope Emeritus. Were they more famous than Betty White?
LANCE: YES!
BILL: And that’s the problem. If I changed it to The Pele Award and later to The Jimmy Carter Award, that’s three names in three years. Also,
If it was The Pele Award, people would think it has to do with Soccer.
If it was The Pope Benedict award people would think it has to do with the Catholic Church.
If it was The Jimmy Carter award, people would think it was about building houses.
If it was The Manmohan Singh award, people would think I am not an ignorant American who knows nothing about Indian Politics.
With Betty White there is nothing so striking about her to think its about something else. (Not quite true- she was involved with Animal Rights.)
LANCE: Yup, Carter got the Nobel prize for homebuilding. You over estimate how many people care about The Betty White Award. But you named the award after Betty White only because she died shortly before you started the award. Hardly seems like a good criteria.Â
BILL: Well, we do this all the time in computer science.
LANCE: Indeed. Some of them, like the Turing Award, survived the test of time. Others, which we shall not name, have not.
But anyway, all of this raises the question, should we change the name when we have more famous dead people?Â
BILL: Rarely. Do you have examples of names being changed?
LANCE: Yes, though not replaced by other names.
The best student paper award at the Complexity Conference was named after Ronald Book from 1999 to 2104 and then quietly dropped when the conference left the IEEE. And of course when Rolf Nevanlinna got cancelled in 2019, changing his award to the Abacus Medal. Not a person named Abacus but the ancient computing device. Personally I’m holding out for the Slide Rule Statue.
BILL: So, we need more examples of name changes that are NOT because a person was cancelled or a conference changes organizations.
LANCE: It’s hard to do because it’s admitting you made a mistake to begin with. So instead we are getting gun shy on new award names. The ACM has made it harder to make a named award and the more recent SIGACT awards have been named after those who died long ago (Gödel) or still living (Knuth). An exception was made for the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at STOC. Danny died fighting the terrorists on American Flight 11 on September 11, 2001 and the award was named for him starting in 2002.
BILL: So it’s no longer worth dying early to get an award.
LANCE: I wouldn’t recommend it.