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Opinion

Computing For Humans

Leibniz conceived of a universal mathematical language in which all human knowledge can be expressed, and calculational rules carried out by machines to derive all logical relationships. His definition of computing captures, I believe, the essence of our field.
Opinion

Is Moore’s Party Over?

For almost 50 years we have been riding Moore's Law's exponential curve. Oh, what a ride it has been! No other technology has ever improved at a geometric rate for decades. But exponential trends always slow down, and the end of "Moore's Party" may be near.
Opinion

Are You Talking to Me?

I recently attended a rather theoretical computer-science conference, and sat, as is my habit, in the front row. The speaker was trying to convey the fine details of a rather intricate mathematical construction. I was hopelessly lost.
Opinion

Solving the Unsolvable

On June 16, 1902, philosopher Bertrand Russell sent a letter to Gottlob Frege in which he argued that Frege's logical system was inconsistent. The letter launched a "Foundational Crisis" in mathematics, triggering an almost anguished search for proper foundations for mathematics.
Opinion

Fumbling the Future

Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer tells the gripping story of how Xerox invented the personal-computing technology in the 1970s, and then "miscalculated and mishandled" the opportunity to fully exploit it.
Opinion

Where Have All the Workshops Gone?

My initiation into the computing-research community was a workshop on "Logic and Databases" in 1979. I was the only graduate student attending the workshop. In spite of the informality of the event I was quite in awe of the senior researchers who attended.
Opinion

Science Has Only Two Legs

Science has been growing new legs of late. The traditional "legs" (or "pillars") of the scientific method were theory and experimentation. Computational science has been called the 'third pillar' of scientific inquiry, and has been recently augmented by yet a "fourth paradigm."

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