As told by Martin Davis:A woman heading a research group on theoretical computer science at Microsoft meets Bill Gates for the first time. She says how wonderful it is for Bill Gates to head a company that supports a group–her research group–that has little chance of generating any application before …
David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Norton, 2006.Alan Turing is an iconic figure. He was one of the main founders of the mathematical theory of computability. He proved that first-order logic is undecidable. He was one of the main brains behind the allies’ successful effort to break Nazi …
Experimental philosophy is a recent philosophical movement. In spite of the name, its proponents do not attempt to do philosophy by conducting experiments. Strictly speaking, they don’t conduct experiments at all (at least in the literature I’ve read).They conduct surveys, however, in which they ask for subjects’ opinions on a …
Amos Elon, “A Shrine to Mussolini,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, N. 3.Relevant personal background: I was born and raised in Italy but moved to the U.S. in 1996. Amos Elon is an Austrian Jew who immigrated to Palestine in 1933, became a major Israeli journalist and …
