Related papers: Boris (Boaz) Trakhtenbrot -- The Beginning
Lev T. Kuzin (1928--1997) is one of the founders of modern cybernetics and information science in Russia. He was awarded and honored the USSR State Prize for inspiring vision into the future of technical cybernetics and his invention and…
The "Millennium Prize Problems" have a place in the history of mathematics. Here we tell some little-known anecdotes from the perspective of the planner of that project. These stories are far from their end; more likely they are just at…
The present document is an excerpt of an essay that I wrote as part of my application material to graduate school in Computer Science (with a focus on Artificial Intelligence), in 1986. I was not invited by any of the schools that received…
While I was dealing with a brain injury and finding it difficult to work, two friends (Derek Westen, a friend of the KITP, and Steve Shenker, with whom I was recently collaborating), suggested that a new direction might be good. Steve in…
The term architecture has evolved considerably from its original Greek roots and its application to buildings and computers to its more recent manifestation for minds. This article considers lessons from this history, in terms of a set of…
Ren{\'e} Thom discovered several refined topological notions in the writings of Aristotle, especially the biological. More generally, he considered that some of the assertions of the Greek philosophers have a definite topological content,…
Despite ongoing calls for inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy in computing education, the teaching of algorithms remains largely decontextualized. Foundational computer science courses often present algorithmic thinking as purely…
Hypercomputation is a relatively new branch of computer science that emerged from the idea that the Church--Turing Thesis, which is supposed to describe what is computable and what is noncomputable, cannot possible be true. Because of its…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
This is a recollection of the UC Berkeley Postgres project, which was led by Mike Stonebraker from the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's. The article was solicited for Stonebraker's Turing Award book, as one of many personal/historical…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…
In this paper I describe the early development of the so-called mathematical biophysics, as conceived by Nicolas Rashevsky back in the 1920's, as well as his latter idealization of a "relational biology". I also underline that the creation…
Euclid pioneered the concept of a mathematical theory developed from axioms by a series of justified proof steps. From the outset there were critics and improvers. In this century the use of computers to check proofs for correctness sets a…
Stirling Colgate was a remarkably imaginative physicist, an independent thinker with a wide breadth of interests and contagious enthusiasm, a born leader with enduring drive to attack fundamental problems in science. Among his many…
The digital age introduced the Digital Ecological Niche (DEN), revolutionizing human interactions. The advent of Digital History (DHy) has marked a methodological shift in historical studies, tracing its roots to Babbage and Lovelace's…
Detlef D\"urr (1951-2021) was a theoretical and mathematical physicist who worked particularly on the foundations of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. This piece is a rather personal look back at him and his…
Logic has its origins in basic questions about the nature of the real world and how we describe it. This article seeks to bring out the physical and epistemological relevance of some of the more recent technical work in logic and…
Benoit Mandelbrot's scientific legacy spans an extraordinary range of disciplines, from linguistics and fluid turbulence to cosmology and finance, suggesting the intellectual temperament of a "fox" in Isaiah Berlin's famous dichotomy of…
Digital ethics, also known as computer ethics or information ethics, is now a lively field that draws a lot of attention, but how did it come about and what were the developments that lead to its existence? What are the traditions, the…
The mystery about the ingenious creator of Bitcoin concealing behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto has been fascinating the global public for more than a decade. Suddenly jumping out of the dark in 2008, this persona hurled the…