Surely you’re familiar with curry, a delicious way of preparing food. And it’s possible to curry favor, if you’re in the sphere of some influential person who could do something to benefit you. But if you’ve ever done any computer programming, maybe you’ve run into a situation where you have a function that takes several arguments. That can be very complicated to deal with, and I believe in some programming languages it’s actually impossible, because they only allow single-argument functions. Luckily there’s a relatively simple process of turning, for example, one three-argument function into three one-argument functions. I’m not going to go into how, because the important part is that It’s called currying.
Why, you ask, feigning interest in this massively obscure bit of trivia, is it referred to as if it were on the lunch menu? Simple, it was invented by Haskell Curry, who was born September 12, 1900 in Massachusetts, USA. He was a mathematician, not a programmer, but his work had so much direct application to computer science that the Haskell programming language is named after him (and by the way, Haskell only allows single-argument functions, in case you were wondering). His full name was Haskell Brooks Curry, and there are also programming languages called Brooks and Curry (but good luck finding anybody who uses them).
Curry (and here I mean the guy) originally set out to study medicine when he enrolled in Harvard in 1916 (note that he was only 16 at the time), but switched to math after two years Then he switched to MIT to get a Master’s in electrical engineering, then returned to Harvard to study physics, and earned another Master’s degree. In the mid 1920s he was a math instructor at Princeton, and got married, then moved to Germany where Curry earned a PhD in math, supervised by David Hilbert (to name-drop a famous mathematician). Anyway, they moved back to the US and settled in Pennsylvania. During World War II Curry did math for the US government (apparently not associated with the Manhattan atomic bomb project, which employed hundreds of mathematicians), and immediately afterward came his connection with computer science: he worked on the ENIAC project that produced (probably) the first programmable, fully electronic, digital computer.
There are a couple of other things named after Curry, including Curry’s Paradox and the Curry-Howard Correspondence, but they’re pure math and I didn’t even bother to look them up. You can thank me at your earliest convenience. And one other bit of Curry trivia you’re probably not interested in is that in academic circles he’s best known for his work in combinatory logic and the paper On the Building Blocks of Mathematical Logic, but the paper was authored by Moses Schönfinkel — evidently everybody was aware that Curry did most of the work on it. I’m sure there’s another story in there, but if you’ve managed to read this far, you deserve a reward and here it is: the end!
