"Oracles were apparently first studied by #Turing, in his 1938 PhD thesis. Obviously anyone who could write a whole thesis about these fictitious entities would have to be an extremely pure theorist, someone who wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything relevant. This was certainly true in Turing’s case – indeed, he spent the years after his PhD, from 1939 to 1943, studying certain abstruse symmetry transformations in a 26 letter alphabet." -- Scott Aaronson, via #SlateStarCodex