That's true. It's said that Turing himself didn't immediately realize the importance of his machines -- he went straight on to considering oracles and super computation, as if Turing machines themselves weren't worthy of further study.
Perhaps it is nit-picking, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and question exactly how important the theoretical notion of a Turing machine actually was for the practical development of computer algorithms. Probably a much more important development was the invention of the Von Neumann architecture and its use in the IAS machine and later the JOHHNIAC. And also lambda calculus for its spawning of functional programming languages.
Von Neumann is the best example I can think of a blue-sky thinker whose work had profound practical impacts all over the place. Maybe a recent example of an ingenious pure mathematician who made a practical impact is Terence Tao's invention of compressed sensing.
But on the whole, no-one would argue that the next cryptographic breakthrough is going to come from category theory. Some parts of pure mathematics will always be useless, and everyone knows it.
Perhaps it is nit-picking, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and question exactly how important the theoretical notion of a Turing machine actually was for the practical development of computer algorithms. Probably a much more important development was the invention of the Von Neumann architecture and its use in the IAS machine and later the JOHHNIAC. And also lambda calculus for its spawning of functional programming languages.
Von Neumann is the best example I can think of a blue-sky thinker whose work had profound practical impacts all over the place. Maybe a recent example of an ingenious pure mathematician who made a practical impact is Terence Tao's invention of compressed sensing.
But on the whole, no-one would argue that the next cryptographic breakthrough is going to come from category theory. Some parts of pure mathematics will always be useless, and everyone knows it.