Name	Alan Turing
Birth date	June 23, 1912
Birth place	Maida Vale, London, England, United Kingdom
Death date	June 07, 1954
Death place	Wilmslow, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Field	Mathematics, Cryptanalysis, Computer science
Work institutions	University of Cambridge Government Code and Cypher School National Physical Laboratory University of Manchester
Alma mater	King's College, Cambridge Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	Alonzo Church
Doctoral students	Robin Gandy
Known for	Halting problem Turing machine Cryptanalysis of the Enigma Automatic Computing Engine Turing Award Turing Test Turing patterns
Prizes	Officer of the Order of the British Empire Fellow of the Royal Society

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( ; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.

Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952 — homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time — and he accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined it was suicide; his mother and some others believed his death was accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

Childhood and youth

Alan Turing was conceived in Chhatrapur, Orissa, India. His father, Julius Mathison Turing, was a member of the Indian Civil Service. Julius and wife Sara (née Stoney; 1881–1976, daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, chief engineer of the Madras Railways) wanted Alan to be brought up in England, so they returned to Maida Vale, London, where Alan Turing was born on 23 June 1912, as recorded by a blue plaque on the outside of the building, later the Colonnade Hotel. He had an elder brother, John. His father's civil service commission was still active, and during Turing's childhood years his parents travelled between Hastings, England and India, leaving their two sons to stay with a retired Army couple. Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius he was to display more prominently later.

His parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a day school, at the age of six. The headmistress recognised his talent early on, as did many of his subsequent educators. In 1926, at the age of 14, he went on to Sherborne School, a famous independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset. His first day of term coincided with the General Strike in Britain, but so determined was he to attend his first day that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied more than from Southampton to school, stopping overnight at an inn.

Turing's natural inclination toward mathematics and science did not earn him respect with some of the teachers at Sherborne, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on the classics. His headmaster wrote to his parents: "I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at Public School, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School". Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having even studied elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.

Turing's hopes and ambitions at school were raised by the close friendship he developed with a slightly older fellow student, Christopher Morcom, who was Turing's first love interest. Morcom died suddenly only a few weeks into their last term at Sherborne, from complications of bovine tuberculosis, contracted after drinking infected cow's milk as a boy. Turing's religious faith was shattered and he became an atheist. He adopted the conviction that all phenomena, including the workings of the human brain, must be materialistic, but he still believed in the survival of the spirit after death.

University and work on computability

, Manchester]] After Sherborne, Turing went to study at King's College, Cambridge. He was an undergraduate there from 1931 to 1934, graduating with first-class honours in Mathematics, and in 1935 was elected a fellow at King's on the strength of a dissertation on the central limit theorem.

In his momentous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with what became known as Turing machines, formal and simple devices. He proved that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. He went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide, in general, algorithmically whether a given Turing machine will ever halt. While his proof was published subsequent to Alonzo Church's equivalent proof in respect to his lambda calculus, Turing was unaware of Church's work at the time.

In his memoirs Turing wrote that he was disappointed about the reception of this 1936 paper and that only two people had reacted – these being and Richard Bevan Braithwaite.

Turing's approach is considerably more accessible and intuitive. It was also novel in its notion of a 'Universal (Turing) Machine', the idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other machine. Or in other words, is provably capable of computing anything that is computable. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation, the simplest example being a 2 state 3 symbol Turing machine discovered by Stephen Wolfram.

The paper also introduces the notion of definable numbers.

From September 1936 to July 1938 he spent most of his time at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, studying under Alonzo Church. As well as his pure mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. In June 1938 he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton; his dissertation introduced the notion of relative computing, where Turing machines are augmented with so-called oracles, allowing a study of problems that cannot be solved by a Turing machine.

Back in Cambridge, he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. The two argued and disagreed, with Turing defending formalism and Wittgenstein arguing that mathematics does not discover any absolute truths but rather invents them. He also started to work part-time with the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS).

Cryptanalysis

. Turing worked here from 1939 to 1940, when he moved to Hut 8.]] During the Second World War, Turing was a main participant in the efforts at Bletchley Park to break German ciphers. Building on cryptanalysis work carried out in Poland by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski from Cipher Bureau before the war, he contributed several insights into breaking both the Enigma machine and the Lorenz SZ 40/42 (a Teleprinter (Teletype) cipher attachment codenamed Tunny by the British), and was, for a time, head of Hut 8, the section responsible for reading German naval signals.

From September 1938, Turing had been working part-time (notionally for the British Foreign Office) with the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), the British code breaking organisation. He worked on the problem of the German Enigma machine, and collaborated with Dilly Knox, a senior GCCS codebreaker. On 4 September 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of GCCS.

In 1945, Turing was awarded the OBE for his wartime services, but his work remained secret for many years.

Turing had something of a reputation for eccentricity at Bletchley Park. Jack Good, a cryptanalyst who worked with him, is quoted by Ronald Lewin as having said of Turing:

in the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off. His bicycle had a fault: the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in time to adjust the chain by hand. Another of his eccentricities is that he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent it being stolen.

While working at Bletchley, Turing, a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the to London when he was needed for high-level meetings.

Turing–Welchman bombe

Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park,

The bombe searched for possibly correct settings used for an Enigma message (i.e., rotor order, rotor settings, etc.), and used a suitable crib: a fragment of probable plaintext. For each possible setting of the rotors (which had of the order of 10¹⁹ states, or 10²² for the four-rotor U-boat variant), the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, implemented electrically. The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred, and ruled out that setting, moving onto the next. Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail. Turing's bombe was first installed on 18 March 1940. More than two hundred bombes were in operation by the end of the war.

Hut 8 and Naval Enigma

at Bletchley Park, commissioned by the American philanthropist Sidney E Frank.]] Turing decided to tackle the particularly difficult problem of German naval Enigma "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself". In December 1939, Turing solved the essential part of the naval indicator system, which was more complex than the indicator systems used by the other services. The same night that he solved the naval indicator system, he conceived the idea of Banburismus, a sequential statistical technique (what Abraham Wald later called Sequential Analysis) to assist in breaking naval Enigma, "though I was not sure that it would work in practice, and was not in fact sure until some days had actually broken".

In July 1942, Turing devised a technique termed Turingery (or jokingly Turingismus) for use against the Lorenz cipher messages produced by the Germans' new Geheimschreiber machine (secret writer). This was codenamed Tunny at Bletchley Park. He also introduced the Tunny team to Tommy Flowers who, under the guidance of Max Newman, went on to build the Colossus computer, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer, which replaced a simpler prior machine (the Heath Robinson) and whose superior speed allowed the brute-force decryption techniques to be applied usefully to the daily changing cyphers. A frequent misconception is that Turing was a key figure in the design of Colossus; this was not the case.

Turing travelled to the United States in November 1942 and worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington, and assisted at Bell Labs with the development of secure speech devices. He returned to Bletchley Park in March 1943. During his absence, Hugh Alexander had officially assumed the position of head of Hut 8, although Alexander had been de facto head for some time—Turing having little interest in the day-to-day running of the section. Turing became a general consultant for cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park.

Alexander wrote as follows about his contribution:

There should be no question in anyone's mind that Turing's work was the biggest factor in Hut 8's success. In the early days he was the only cryptographer who thought the problem worth tackling and not only was he primarily responsible for the main theoretical work within the Hut but he also shared with Welchman and Keen the chief credit for the invention of the Bombe. It is always difficult to say that anyone is absolutely indispensable but if anyone was indispensable to Hut 8 it was Turing. The pioneer's work always tends to be forgotten when experience and routine later make everything seem easy and many of us in Hut 8 felt that the magnitude of Turing's contribution was never fully realised by the outside world.

In the latter part of the war he moved to work at Hanslope Park, where he further developed his knowledge of electronics with the assistance of engineer Donald Bayley. Together they undertook the design and construction of a portable secure voice communications machine codenamed Delilah. It was intended for different applications, lacking capability for use with long-distance radio transmissions, and in any case, Delilah was completed too late to be used during the war. Though Turing demonstrated it to officials by encrypting/decrypting a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, Delilah was not adopted for use. Turing also consulted with Bell Labs on the development of SIGSALY, a secure voice system that was used in the later years of the war.

Early computers and the Turing test

From 1945 to 1947 he lived in Church Street, Hampton and was at the National Physical Laboratory, where he worked on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine). He presented a paper on 19 February 1946, which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer. Although ACE was a feasible design, the secrecy surrounding the wartime work at Bletchley Park led to delays in starting the project and he became disillusioned. In late 1947 he returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year. While he was at Cambridge, the Pilot ACE was built in his absence. It executed its first program on 10 May 1950.

In 1948 he was appointed Reader in the Mathematics Department at Manchester. In 1949 he became deputy director of the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester, and worked on software for one of the earliest stored-program computers—the Manchester Mark 1. During this time he continued to do more abstract work, and in "Computing machinery and intelligence" (Mind, October 1950), Turing addressed the problem of artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment which became known as the Turing test, an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called "intelligent". The idea was that a computer could be said to "think" if it could fool an interrogator into thinking that the conversation was with a human. In the paper, Turing suggested that rather than building a program to simulate the adult mind, it would be better rather to produce a simpler one to simulate a child's mind and then to subject it to a course of education. A reversed form of the Turing test is widely used on the Internet; the CAPTCHA test is intended to determine whether the user is a human or a computer.

In 1948, Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. In 1952, lacking a computer powerful enough to execute the program, Turing played a game in which he simulated the computer, taking about half an hour per move. The game was recorded. The program lost to Turing's colleague Alick Glennie, although it is said that it won a game against Champernowne's wife.

His Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative and lasting contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence, which continues after more than half a century.

He also invented the LU decomposition method used today for solving an equations matrix in 1948.

Pattern formation and mathematical biology

Turing worked from 1952 until his death in 1954 on mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis. He published one paper on the subject called The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis in 1952, putting forth the Turing hypothesis of pattern formation. His central interest in the field was understanding Fibonacci phyllotaxis, the existence of Fibonacci numbers in plant structures. He used reaction–diffusion equations which are central to the field of pattern formation. Later papers went unpublished until 1992 when Collected Works of A.M. Turing was published. His contribution is considered a seminal piece of work in this field.

Conviction for indecency

In January 1952, Turing met Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house again, and apparently spent the night there.

After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime for which Oscar Wilde had been convicted more than fifty years earlier.

Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections.

Turing's conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ. His British passport was not revoked, though he was denied entry to the United States after his conviction. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, because of the recent exposure of the first two members of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, was prevented from discussing his war work.

Death

On 8 June 1954, Turing's cleaner found him dead; he had died the previous day. A post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide, it is speculated that this was the means by which a fatal dose was delivered. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide, and he was cremated at Woking Crematorium on 12 June 1954. Turing's mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son's careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, pointing out that he took "an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Witch immerses her apple in the poisonous brew."

Epitaph

Recognition and tributes

, Cheshire]]

A biography published by the Royal Society shortly after Turing's death (and whilst his wartime work was still subject to the Official Secrets Act) recorded: }}

Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person for technical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's highest honour, equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Breaking the Code is a 1986 play by Hugh Whitemore about Alan Turing. The play ran in London's West End beginning in November 1986 and on Broadway from 15 November 1987 to 10 April 1988. There was also a 1996 BBC television production. In all cases, Derek Jacobi played Turing. The Broadway production was nominated for three Tony Awards including Best Actor in a Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play, and Best Direction of a Play, and for two Drama Desk Awards, for Best Actor and Best Featured Actor. Turing was one of four mathematicians examined in the 2008 BBC documentary entitled "Dangerous Knowledge".

On 23 June 1998, on what would have been Turing's 86th birthday, Andrew Hodges, his biographer, unveiled an official English Heritage Blue Plaque at his birthplace and childhood home in Warrington Crescent, London, later the Colonnade hotel. To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, a memorial plaque was unveiled on 7 June 2004 at his former residence, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow, Cheshire.

On 13 March 2000, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines issued a set of stamps to celebrate the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, one of which carries a recognisable portrait of Turing against a background of repeated 0s and 1s, and is captioned: "1937: Alan Turing's theory of digital computing".

On 28 October 2004, a bronze statue of Alan Turing sculpted by John W Mills was unveiled at the University of Surrey in Guildford, marking the 50th anniversary of Turing's death; it portrays him carrying his books across the campus.

In 2006, Boston Pride named Turing their Honorary Grand Marshal.

The Princeton Alumni Weekly named Turing the second most significant alumnus in the history of Princeton University, second only to President James Madison.

A 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Turing was unveiled on 19 June 2007 at Bletchley Park. Built from approximately half a million pieces of Welsh slate, it was sculpted by Stephen Kettle, having been commissioned by the late American billionaire Sidney Frank.

Turing has been honoured in various ways in Manchester, the city where he worked towards the end of his life. In 1994, a stretch of the A6010 road (the Manchester city intermediate ring road) was named Alan Turing Way. A bridge carrying this road was widened, and carries the name Alan Turing Bridge. A statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester on 23 June 2001. It is in Sackville Park, between the University of Manchester building on Whitworth Street and the Canal Street gay village. The memorial statue, depicts the "father of Computer Science" sitting on a bench at a central position in the park. The statue was unveiled on Turing's birthday.

Turing is shown holding an apple—a symbol classically used to represent forbidden love, the object that inspired Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation, and the means of Turing's own death. The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text 'Alan Mathison Turing 1912–1954', and the motto 'Founder of Computer Science' as it would appear if encoded by an Enigma machine: 'IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ'.

A plinth at the statue's feet says 'Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, victim of prejudice'. There is also a Bertrand Russell quotation saying 'Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.' The sculptor buried his old Amstrad computer, which was an early popular home computer, under the plinth, as a tribute to "the godfather of all modern computers".

In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the for his role in the creation of the modern computer, and stated: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."

In 2002, Turing was ranked twenty-first on the BBC nationwide poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

The logo of Apple computer is often erroneously referred to as a tribute to Alan Turing, with the bite mark a reference to his method of suicide. Both the designer of the logo and the company deny that there is any homage to Turing in the design of the logo.

In 2010, actor/playwright Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Turing in the solo musical, "ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 4."

Government apology

In August 2009, John Graham-Cumming started a petition urging the British Government to posthumously apologise to Alan Turing for prosecuting him as a homosexual. The petition received thousands of signatures. Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged the petition, releasing a statement on 10 September 2009 apologising and describing Turing's treatment as "appalling":

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him ... So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better. The University of Texas at Austin has an honours computer science programme named the Turing Scholars. One of the amphitheatres of the Computer Science department (LIFL) at the University of Lille in northern France is named in honor of Alan M. Turing (the other amphitheatre is named after Kurt Gödel).

The Department of Computer Science at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia, King's College, Cambridge and Bangor University in Wales have computer laboratories named after Turing.

The University of Manchester, The Open University, Oxford Brookes University and Aarhus University (in Århus, Denmark) all have buildings named after Turing.

Alan Turing Road in the Surrey Research Park is named for Alan Turing.

Carnegie Mellon University has a granite bench, situated in The Hornbostel Mall, with the name "A. M. Turing" carved across the top, "Read" down the left leg, and "Write" down the other.

The École Internationale des Sciences du Traitement de l'Information has named its recently acquired third building "Turing".

See also

Turing degree

Turing switch

Unorganized machine

Alan Turing Year

Good–Turing frequency estimation

Turing machine examples

Turing test

Notes

References

{{ Cite book | last = Copeland (ed.) | first = B. Jack | authorlink = B. Jack Copeland

| title = Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine | year = 2005 | publisher = Oxford University Press | location = Oxford | isbn = 0-19-856593-3 | oclc = 224640979 56539230 }}

Petzold, Charles (2008). "The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine". Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing. ISBN 978-0-470-22905-7

Smith, Roger (1997). Fontana History of the Human Sciences. London: Fontana.

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason. London: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0463-3

Turing's mother, who survived him by many years, wrote this 157-page biography of her son, glorifying his life. It was published in 1959, and so could not cover his war work. Scarcely 300 copies were sold (Sara Turing to Lyn Newman, 1967, Library of St John's College, Cambridge). The six-page foreword by Lyn Irvine includes reminiscences and is more frequently quoted. This 1986 Hugh Whitemore play tells the story of Turing's life and death. In the original West End and Broadway runs, Derek Jacobi played Turing and he recreated the role in a 1997 television film based on the play made jointly by the BBC and WGBH, Boston. The play is published by Amber Lane Press, Oxford - ASIN: B000B7TM0Q

Williams, Michael R. (1985) A History of Computing Technology, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-8186-7739-2

Further reading

External links

Alan Turing site maintained by Andrew Hodges including a short biography

AlanTuring.net – Turing Archive for the History of Computing by Jack Copeland

The Turing Archive – contains scans of some unpublished documents and material from the Kings College, Cambridge archive

Alan Turing RKBExplorer

Alan Turing Year

CiE 2012: Turing Centenary Conference

Visual Turing

Turing Machine calculators at Wolfram Alpha

Papers

An extensive list of Turing's papers, reports and lectures, plus translated versions and collections BibNetWiki

Oral history interview with Donald W. Davies, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; Davies describes computer projects at the U.K. National Physical Laboratory, from the 1947 design work of Alan Turing to the development of the two ACE computers

Oral history interview with Nicholas C. Metropolis, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Metropolis was the first director of computing services at Los Alamos National Laboratory; topics include the relationship between Alan Turing and John von Neumann

Category:Articles with inconsistent citation formats Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:20th-century philosophers Category:Academics of the University of Manchester Category:Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Category:Artificial intelligence researchers Category:British cryptographers Category:British people of World War II Category:Computer designers Category:Computer pioneers Category:English atheists Category:English computer scientists Category:English inventors Category:English logicians Category:English mathematicians Category:English philosophers Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:History of artificial intelligence Category:Inventors who committed suicide Category:LGBT people from England Category:Long-distance runners Category:Mathematicians who committed suicide Category:Members of the Order of the British Empire Category:Old Shirburnians Category:Officers of the Order of the British Empire Category:People associated with Bletchley Park Category:People from Maida Vale Category:People from Wilmslow Category:People prosecuted under anti-homosexuality laws Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Scientists who committed suicide Category:Suicides by poison Category:Suicides in England Category:Theoretical computer scientists Category:1912 births Category:1954 deaths Category:Blue plaques Category:Bayesian statisticians

Name	Jaron Lanier
Caption	Lanier performing at the Garden of Memory Solstice Concert in June, 2009
Birth date	May 03, 1960
Birth place	New York City
Known for	Virtual reality
Occupation	Computer scientist, Composer, Visual artist, and Author.

Jaron Zepel Lanier (born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. He made an experimental film in the past, but does not consider himself a filmmaker. In the early 1980s he popularized the term "Virtual Reality" (VR) for a field in which he was a pioneer. In 2010, he was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people.

Early life and education

Lanier was born in 1960 in New York City, but raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. His family was bohemian and poor, living in tents for an extended period before building a "strange house", which Jaron helped design. After dropping out of both high school and art college, he "tried his hand at goat-herding and midwifery" before moving to California. the 1995 documentary Synthetic Pleasures, an effort devoted to utilizing computer technology to give people who are separated by great distances the illusion that they are physically together. Lanier is a member of the Global Business Network, part of the Monitor Group.

In 1994, he released the classical music album Instruments of Change which has been described as a Western exploration of Asian musical traditions by Stephen Hill on "The Crane Flies West 2" (episode 357) of Hearts of Space. Lanier is currently working on a book Technology and the Future of the Human Soul,

Lanier has served on numerous advisory boards, including the Board of Councilors of the University of Southern California, Medical Media Systems (a medical visualization spin-off company associated with Dartmouth College), Microdisplay Corporation, and NY3D (developers of auto stereo displays).

He was a visiting scholar with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University (1997–2001), a visiting artist with New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and a founding member of the International Institute for Evolution and the Brain.

Lanier contributed the afterword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.

Career timeline

( source: Jaron Lanier's website )

2010- Innovator In Residence, USC Annenberg

2009- Partner Architect, Microsoft

2006-2009 Scholar at Large, Microsoft Live Labs

2006- Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, CET, UC Berkeley

2004- Fellow, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley

2003-2005 Visiting Scientist, Silicon Graphics

2002-2004 Jones Center Fellow, Wharton School, UPenn

2002- Visiting Faculty, Dartmouth College (Surgical Simulation And Tele-Medicine)

1999-2002 Chief Scientist, Eyematic Interfaces (IP and most of team now at Google)

1997-2001 Chief Scientist, Advanced Network And Services (Parent organization at the time of the Engineering Office Of Internet2)

1997-2000 Lead Scientist, National Tele-Immersion Initiative (1st Tele-I Implementation)

1997-2001 Visiting Scholar, Columbia University

1996-2001 Visiting Artist, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

1984-1990 CEO, VPL Research (1st Multiperson VR And First Commercial VR Products)

1983-1984 Researcher, Atari Labs

1980-1983 Independent Video Game Developer

1979-1980 Student Researcher On NSF-Funded Project On Digital Graphical Simulations For Learning At New Mexico State University

1974-1978 Independent goat milk and cheese provider

Computer science

Lanier’s interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics. He collaborates with a wide range of scientists in fields related to these interests.

In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first "avatars", or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications. Sun Microsystems acquired VPL's seminal portfolio of patents related to Virtual Reality and networked 3D graphics in 1999.

From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004, he was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion.

Music

As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new classical music since the late 1970s. He is a pianist and a specialist in many unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Duncan Sheik, Pauline Oliveros, and Stanley Jordan. Recording projects include his acoustic techno duet with Sean Lennon and an album of duets with flautist Robert Dick.

He also writes chamber and orchestral music. Current commissions include an opera that will premiere in Busan, South Korea, and a symphony, Symphony for Amelia, to be premiered by the Bach Festival Society Orchestra and Choir in Winter Park, Florida, in October 2010. Recent commissions include “Earthquake!” a ballet that premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in April 2006; “Little Shimmers” for the TroMetrik ensemble, which premiered at ODC in San Francisco in April 2006; “Daredevil” for the ArrayMusic chamber ensemble, which premiered in Toronto in 2006; A concert-length sequence of works for orchestra and virtual worlds (including "Canons for Wroclaw," "Khaenoncerto," "The Egg," and others) celebrating the 1000th birthday of the city of Wroclaw, Poland, premiered in 2000; A triple concerto, "The Navigator Tree," commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Composers Forum, premiered in 2000; and "Mirror/Storm," a symphony commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which premiered in 1998. Continental Harmony was a PBS special that documented the development and premiere of “The Navigator Tree” won a CINE Golden Eagle Award. His album Instruments of Change was released on POINT Music/Philips/PolyGram Records in 1994.

Lanier's work with Asian instruments can be heard extensively on the soundtrack of Three Seasons (1999), which was the first film ever to win both the Audience and Grand Jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival. He and Mario Grigorov are currently scoring a new film called The Third Wave, which premiered at Sundance in 2007. He is working with Terry Riley on a collaborative opera to be titled Bastard, the First.

Lanier has also pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in musical stage performance with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act in venues such as the Montreux Jazz Festival. He plays virtual instruments and uses real instruments to guide events in virtual worlds.

In October 2010, Lanier collaborated with Rollins College and John V. Sinclair's Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra for his Worldwide Premiere of “Symphony for Amelia.”

Philosophical and technological ideas

Some of Lanier's speculation involves what he dubbed "post-symbolic communication." An example is found in the April 2006 issue of Discover, in his column on cephalopods (i.e., the various species of octopus, squid, and related molluscs). Many cephalopods are able to morph their bodies, including changing the pigmentation and texture of their skin, as well as forming complex shape imitations with their limbs. Lanier sees this behavior, especially as exchanged between two octopodes, as a direct behavioral expression of thought.

Criticism of any single (simple) paradigm on knowledge approach

In his online essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about himself), describing it as "digital Maoism".

In December 2006 Lanier followed up his critique of the collective wisdom with an article in Edge titled "Beware the Online Collective". Lanier writes:

:I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.

and that:

: What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.

Lanier argues that the search for deeper information in any area sooner or later requires that you find information that has been produced by a single person, or a few devoted individuals: ''"You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning." He finds that it has retarded progress in computer science and innovation in music. He attacks some of the sacred cows of today including Wikipedia and Linux in this manifesto, Wikipedia for its function of "mob rule" by anonymous authors and editors, along with the weakness of its non-scientific content and its bullying of contributors who have genuine expertise in their field. He also argues that there are limitations of certain aspects of the "open source" and "open content" and that they lack the ability to create anything truly new and innovative. He further argues that these approaches have destroyed opportunities for the middle class to finance content creation, and have concentrated wealth in what he calls "the gods in the clouds": people who, rather than innovating, insert themselves as content concentrators at strategic times and locations in the "cloud".

Awards

Carnegie Mellon University's Watson award in 2001

finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005. POINT Music/Philips/PolyGram Records

Video games

Moondust (C64, 1983)

Alien Garden (, 1982)

Significant papers

Edge, 11.11.00">"One Half of a Manifesto", Edge, 11.11.00

Edge, 5.30.06">"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", Edge, 5.30.06

Edge, 12.25.06">"Beware the Online Collective", Edge, 12.25.06

Books

Information Is an Alienated Experience, Basic Books, 2006. ISBN 0-465-03282-6

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, ISBN 978-1846143410

Speeches

'Finding Humanity in the Interface: Capacity Atrophy or Augmentation?' A debate between Jaron Lanier and Will Wright from the Accelerating Change 2004 conference.

Video of Jaron Lanier speaking at a Film Festival

Video of Jaron Lanier's "McLuhan Ramp" Lecture

Video of Jaron Lanier with Neal Stephenson, Neil Gershenfeld, Raymond Laflamme, and Tara Hunt, on The Agenda with Steve Paikin at the Quantum to Cosmos festival.

Video of panel discussion with Jaron Lanier, Neal Stephenson and Lee Smolin, "Seeing Science Through Fiction" at the Quantum to Cosmos festival

Podcast of Science in the Pub panel discussion with Jaron Lanier, Hod Lipson, Wilson da Silva and Eliezer Yudkowsky: "So We're All Gonna be Robots, Now?"

Video of Jaron Lanier giving a talk titled: 'Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World' at Zócalo public square, on January 28, 2010

Audio of Jaron Lanier speaking at the London School of Economics

Interviews

Interview with Jaron Lanier on Music

Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier, Part 1

The Future of Virtual Reality: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier, Part 2

Interview by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Counterpoint program; Lanier strongly criticises both Wikipedia and singularitarianism

A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

"You Are Not a Gadget" author Jaron Lanier on Media Matters with Bob McChesney, Sunday, March 28, 2010, hosted by Robert W. McChesney.

References

* [Lanier and his theories are prominently featured in the section Prevail]

Colonizing Virtual Reality Construction of the Discourse of Virtual Reality, 1984-1992 by Chris Chesher (Cultronix)

External links

Jaron Lanier's Website

Video discussion with Lanier involving intelligence (and AI) with Eliezer Yudkowsky on Bloggingheads.tv.

Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:People from New York City Category:American computer scientists Category:Virtual reality pioneers Category:Columbia University faculty Category:Dartmouth College faculty Category:University of California, Berkeley people Category:American musicians Category:Wired (magazine) people Category:Guzheng players Category:Computer graphics researchers Category:SGI people Category:Internet critics Category:Critics of Wikipedia

Region	Western Philosophy
Era	19th century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Image name	Henry David Thoreau.jpg
Name	Henry David Thoreau
Birth date	July 12, 1817
Birth place	Concord, Massachusetts
Death date	May 06, 1862
Death place	Concord, Massachusetts
School tradition	Transcendentalism
Main interests	Natural history
Notable ideas	Abolitionism, tax resistance, development criticism, civil disobedience, conscientious objection, direct action, environmentalism, nonviolent resistance, simple living

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore; while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time imploring one to abandon waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government – "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government" – the direction of this improvement aims at anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."

Early life and education

He was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, to John Thoreau (a pencil maker) and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was of French origin and was born in Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student "Butter Rebellion", the first recorded student protest in the Colonies. David Henry was named after a recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become "Henry David" until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord and is currently the focus of preservation efforts. The house is original, but it now stands about 100 yards away from its first site.

Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt each wrote that "Thoreau" is pronounced like the word "thorough", whose standard American pronunciation rhymes with "furrow". Edward Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced "Thó-row, the h sounded, and accent on the first syllable." In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called "my most prominent feature." Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "[Thoreau] is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty." Thoreau also wore a neck-beard for many years, which he insisted many women found attractive. However, Louisa May Alcott mentioned to Ralph Waldo Emerson that Thoreau's facial hair "will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity." His comment was: "Let every sheep keep its own skin", a reference to the tradition of diplomas being written on sheepskin vellum.

Return to Concord: 1837–1841

The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—failed to interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. after cutting himself while shaving. He died in his brother Henry's arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published there was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the playwright of the same name, published in The Dial in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry on October 22, 1837, reads, "'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day."

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts," as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house. There, from 1841–1844, he served as the children's tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, and tutored the family sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he continued to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire and bought in 1821 by relative Charles Dunbar. (The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, was patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795). His other source had been Tantiusques, an Indian operated mine in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), which was used to ink typesetting machines.

Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed of Walden Woods. He spoke often of finding a farm to buy or lease, which he felt would give him a means to support himself while also providing enough solitude to write his first book.

Civil Disobedience and the Walden years: 1845–1849

Thoreau needed to concentrate and get himself working more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of that Emerson had bought, from his family home.

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. (The next day Thoreau was freed, against his wishes, when his aunt paid his taxes.) The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government" explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26: :

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819), that Shelley begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time – and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold. Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."

John Updike wrote in 2004,

Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a home on Belknap Street nearby. In 1850, he and his family moved into a home at 255 Main Street; he stayed there until his death.

Later years: 1851–1862

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his words.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the township in his journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

Until the 1970s, literary critics dismissed Thoreau's late pursuits as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, "The Succession of Forest Trees," shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.

He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. Although provincial in his physical travels, he was extraordinarily well-read and vicariously a world traveler. He obsessively devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and Cook, the arctic explorers Franklin, Mackenzie and Parry, Darwin's account of his voyage on the Beagle, Livingstone and Burton on Africa, Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of global reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world, and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler."

After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a speech – A Plea for Captain John Brown – which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: "If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact."

Death

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1859, following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: "I did not know we had ever quarreled."

Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian". He died on May 6, 1862 at age 44. Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (N42° 27' 53.7" W71° 20' 33") in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau's journals, which he often mined for his published works but which remained largely unpublished at his death, were first published in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new, expanded edition of the journals is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society.

Beliefs

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden: "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."

Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitration between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of North American humanity. He decried the latter endlessly but felt the teachers need to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. He was in many ways a 'visible saint', a point of contact with the wilds, even if the land he lived on had been gifted to him by Emerson and was far from cut-off. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred "partially cultivated country." His idea of being "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail," but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash writes: "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance." On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: "I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?" E. B. White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey and Gustav Stickley. Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower and Loren Eiseley, whom Publisher's Weekly called "the modern Thoreau." English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau's ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt's advocacy.

Mahatma Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,' written about 80 years ago."

Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of non-violent resistance was reading "On Civil Disobedience" in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was

Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him in his youth. and, in 1945, wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau. Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau's instrument) is a character picture and he also set Thoreau's words.

Anarchism

Anarchism started to have an ecological view mainly in the writings of Thoreau. In his book Walden "Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented today in John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. For George Woodcock this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism which is the nature of American society in the mid XIX century." Zerzan included Thoreau's text "Excursions" (1863) in his edited compilation titled Against civilization: Readings and reflections from 1999. Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated Thoreau and referred to him as "the greatest American anarchist."

Thoreau was an important influence on late 19th century anarchist naturism, the combination of anarchist and naturist philosophies. Mainly it had importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, and Portugal.

Critique

Thoreau's ideas were not universally applauded by some of his contemporaries in literary circles.

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy:

...Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was particularly critical of Thoreau. He wrote that Thoreau, "has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men- an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood". He would later criticize his writing ability by saying, "There is one chance in a thousand that he might write a most excellent and readable book," but if he did it would be "a book of simple observation of nature, somewhat in the vein of White's History of Selborne".

Poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the message of Walden, decreeing that Thoreau wanted man to "lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs." He went further to castigate the work as "very wicked and heathenish", remarking "I prefer walking on two legs."

In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:

People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.

Works

. Those in the nest are of yellow warbler, the other two of red-tailed hawk]]

*Aulus Persius Flaccus (1840) The Service (1840) A Walk to Wachusett (1842) Paradise (to be) Regained (1843) The Landlord (1843)

Sir Walter Raleigh (1844)

Herald of Freedom (1844) Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845)

Reform and the Reformers (1846–48)

Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience (1849) An Excursion to Canada (1853) Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) Walden (1854) A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859) The Last Days of John Brown (1860) Walking (1861) Autumnal Tints (1862) Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862) Excursions (1863) Life Without Principle (1863) Night and Moonlight (1863)

The Highland Light (1864)

The Maine Woods (1864) Cape Cod (1865) Letters to Various Persons (1865) A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866)

Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)

Summer (1884) Winter (1888) Autumn (1892) Miscellanies (1894) Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894)

Poems of Nature (1895)

Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898)

The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905) Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906) The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958)

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

References

Further reading

Bode, Carl. Best of Thoreau's Journals. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967

Botkin, Daniel. No Man's Garden

Dean, Bradley P. ed., Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 1982

Hendrix, George. "The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' on Gandhi's Satyagraha." The New England Quarterly. 1956

Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer. Viking Press, 1982

Myerson, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995

Nash, Roderick. Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher

Parrington, Vernon. Main Current in American Thought. V 2 online. 1927

Petroski, Henry. "H. D. Thoreau, Engineer." American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8–16

Richardson, Robert D. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1986. ISBN 0-520-06346-5

Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. University of California, Berkeley. 2001. ISBN 0-520-23915-6

Thoreau, Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, editor, Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-883011-95-6

_____. I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor, Yale University Press, 2007

_____. The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor, Yale University Press, 2009

_____. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor, Yale University Press, 2004

_____. A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod. Robert F. Sayre, editor, Library of America, 1985 ISBN 0-940450-27-5

_____. The Price of Freedom: Excerpts from Thoreau's Journals ISBN 978-1-4348-0552-2

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science. University of Wisconsin. 1995. ISBN 0-299-14744-4

External links

The Thoreau Society

The Thoreau Edition

The Thoreau Project

The Walden Woods Project by The Thoreau Institute

The Thoreau Farm Trust - His Birthplace

This Date From Henry David Thoreau's Journal

Who He Was & Why He Matters – by Randall Conrad

H D Thoreau - "a site for everything Thoreau"

Henry David Thoreau - by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Henry Thoreau: Transcendental Economist by Vernon L. Parrington

FAQ with Answers about Thoreau

Texts

The Thoreau Reader by The Thoreau Society

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at The Walden Woods Project

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at Princeton University Press

Political & Philosophical Excerpts from Thoreau's Journals

Reflections on a Child's Water Wheel - an Excerpt from Thoreau's 1848 Journal

Scans of Thoreau's Land Surveys at the Concord Free Public Library

Henry David Thoreau Online - The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau

Category:1817 births Category:1862 deaths Category:19th-century philosophers Category:American Unitarians Category:American abolitionists Category:American anarchists Category:American diarists Category:American environmentalists Category:American essayists Category:American naturalists Category:American nature writers Category:American philosophers Category:American poets Category:American political philosophers Category:American spiritual writers Category:American tax resisters Category:American travel writers Category:American vegetarians Category:American nomads Category:Civil disobedience Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:Ecological succession Category:American people of French descent Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Individualist anarchists Category:Lecturers Category:Nature writers Category:People associated with Transcendentalism Category:People from Concord, Massachusetts Category:Writers from Massachusetts

Name	Ingvar Kamprad
Caption	Ingvar Kamprad lecturing a group of students at Växjö University (23 March 2004).
Birth date	March 30, 1926
Birth place	Älmhult, Kronoberg County
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Networth	US$23 billion (2010)
Spouse	Margaretha
Children	4 children: sons Peter, Jonas and Matthias; daughter

Ingvar Feodor Kamprad (; born 30 March 1926) is a Swedish and the founder of IKEA, a retail (specialty) company. , he is the eleventh wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated net worth of around US$23 billion in 2010.

Biography

Early life

Ingvar Kamprad was born in Pjätteryd, now part of Älmhult Municipality, and grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd (now spelled Älmtaryd), near the small village of Agunnaryd in Ljungby Municipality in the province of Småland, Sweden.

He is a second generation German from Sweden, his grandfather having first moved the family to Sweden.

Career

Kamprad began to develop a business as a young boy, selling matches to neighbors from his bicycle. He found that he could buy matches in bulk very cheaply from Stockholm, sell them individually at a low price, and still make a good profit. From matches, he expanded to selling fish, Christmas tree decorations, seeds, and later ballpoint pens and pencils. When Kamprad was 17, his father gave him a cash reward for succeeding in his studies. He used this money to establish what has grown into IKEA.

The acronym IKEA is made up of the initials of his name (Ingvar Kamprad) plus those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd.

Kamprad has lived in Epalinges, Switzerland since 1976. According to an interview with TSR, the French language Swiss TV broadcaster, Kamprad drives a 15-year-old Volvo 240, flies only economy class, and encourages IKEA employees to always write on both sides of a paper. In addition, Kamprad has been known to visit IKEA for a "cheap meal." He is also known to buy Christmas paper and presents in post-Christmas sales. While Kamprad's frugality is well documented, it is also an important part of the carefully managed image presented to IKEA employees and the general public. He less frequently mentions that he owns a villa in an upmarket part of Switzerland, a large country estate in Sweden, and a vineyard in Provence, France, or that he drove a Porsche for several years.

Net worth

According to Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer, he is the wealthiest person in the world. This report is based on the assumption that Kamprad owns the entire company, an approach that both IKEA and the Kamprad family reject. Kamprad personally retains little ownership in the company, having transferred his interest to Stichting INGKA Foundation and INGKA Holding as part of a complex tax sheltering scheme that leaves his actual degree of control vague.

As of March 2005, the sliding value of the United States dollar put Kamprad ahead as the richest person in the world in another report. In March 2010, Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at US$23 billion, making him the 11th richest person in the world.

Fascist involvement

In 1994, the personal letters of the Swedish fascist activist Per Engdahl were made public after his death, and it was revealed that Kamprad had joined Engdahl's pro-fascist New Swedish Movement in 1942. Kamprad had raised funds for and recruited members to said group at least as late as September 1945. When Kamprad quit the group is unknown, but he remained a friend of Engdahl until the early 1950s. Kamprad devotes two chapters to his time in Nysvenska Rörelsen in his book, Leading By Design: The IKEA Story and, in a 1994 letter to IKEA employees, called his affiliation with the organization the "greatest mistake of his life."

See also

List of billionaires

IKANO, Swedish group that is owned by the family Kamprad

References

External links

Ingvar Kamprad: IKEA Founder and One of the World's Richest People (About.com Entrepreneurs)

Kamprad topic page at Forbes.com

Ingvar Kamprad's Timeline and Quotes

The Local - Introducing Ingvar Kamprad (humorous profile)

Top 5 richest people in the world

Category:1926 births Category:Living people Category:People from Älmhult Municipality Category:Swedish people of German descent Category:Swedish businesspeople Category:Businesspeople in retailing Category:Swedish billionaires Category:IKEA

Yngvar Harra (or Ingvar) Proto-Norse *Ingu-Hariz (d. early 7th century) was the son of Östen and reclaimed the Swedish throne for the House of Yngling after the Swedes had rebelled against Sölvi.

Snorri Sturluson relates in his Ynglinga saga that King Ingvar, Östen's son, was a great warrior who often spent time patrolling the shores of his kingdom fighting Danes and Estonian vikings (Víkingr frá Esthland). King Ingvar finally came to a peace agreement with the Danes and could take care of the Estonian vikings.

He consequently started pillaging in Estonia in retribution, and one summer he arrived at a place called Stein (see also Sveigder). The Estonians (sýslu kind) assembled a great army in the interior and attacked King Ingvar in a great battle. The Estonian forces were too powerful and Ingvar fell and the Swedish forces retreated. Ingvar was buried in a mound at a place called Stone or Hill fort (at Steini) on the shores of Estonia (Aðalsýsla).

Snorri then quotes a stanza from Þjóðólfr of Hvinir's Ynglingatal: {| | :Þat stökk upp, :at Yngvari :Sýslu kind :um sóat hafði, :ok ljóshömum :við lagar hjarta :her Eistneskr :at hilmi vá, :ok austmarr :jöfri sœnskum :Gýmis ljóð :at gamni kveðr. | :Certain it is the Estland foe :The fair-haired Swedish king laid low. :On Estland's strand, o'er Swedish graves, :The East Sea sings her song of waves; :King Yngvar's dirge is ocean's roar :Resounding on the rock-ribbed shore. | |}

The Historia Norwegiæ presents a Latin summary of Ynglingatal, older than Snorri's quotation (continuing after Eysteinn): {| | Hujus filius Ynguar, qui cognominatus est canutus, in expeditione occisus est in quadam insula Baltici maris, quæ ab indigenis Eysysla vocatur. Iste ergo genuit Broutonund, quem Sigwardus frater suus [...]. | His son Yngvar, nicknamed the Hoary, was killed by the inhabitants while campaigning on an island in the Baltic called Ösel. Yngvar bred Braut-Ånund, whose brother, Sigurd, [...] | |}

Ynglingatal only mentions the location Sysla (area paying tribute), Historia Norwegiae only mentions that he died during a campaign on the island Eycilla, i.e. Eysysla (Ösel). In addition to his son Anund (Broutonund), it also adds second son named Sigvard.

Thorsteins saga Víkingssonar skips Ingvar's generation and makes his father Östen the father of Anund and grandfather of Ingjald. It adds a second son to Östen named Olaf, who was the king of Fjordane in Norway.

Notes

Primary sources

Ynglingatal

Ynglinga saga (part of the Heimskringla)

Historia Norwegiae

Thorsteins saga Víkingssonar

Secondary sources

Nerman, B. Det svenska rikets uppkomst. Stockholm, 1925.

Category:7th-century deaths Category:Viking Age people Category:Semi-legendary kings of Sweden Category:History of Estonia Category:7th-century rulers in Europe Category:Year of birth unknown

Name	Eduardo Hughes Galeano
Caption	Eduardo Hughes Galeano (2005)
Pseudonym	Eduardo Galeano
Birthdate	September 03, 1940
Birthplace	Montevideo, Uruguay
Occupation	Journalist
Nationality	Uruguayan
Period	20th century
Spouse	Helena Villagra

Eduardo Hughes Galeano (born September 3, 1940) is a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist. His most well known works are Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1986) and Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) which have since been translated into twenty languages and transcend orthodox genres: combining fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. The author himself has proclaimed his obsession as a writer saying, "I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."

Life

Galeano was born in Montevideo, Uruguay to a middle class Catholic family of European descent (Italian,Spanish, German and Welsh descent). Like many young Latin American boys, Galeano dreamed of becoming a football (soccer) player; this desire was reflected in some of his works, such as El Fútbol A Sol Y Sombra (Football In Sun and Shadow). In his teens, Galeano worked odd jobs — as a factory worker, a bill collector, a sign painter, a messenger, a typist, and a bank teller. At 14 years, Galeano sold his first political cartoon to the Socialist Party weekly, El Sol and married for the first time in 1959. He started his career as a journalist in the early 1960s as editor of Marcha, an influential weekly journal which had such contributors as Mario Vargas Llosa, Mario Benedetti, Manuel Maldonado Denis and Roberto Fernández Retamar. For two years he edited the daily Época and worked as editor-in-chief of the University Press. In 1962, having divorced, he remarried to Graciela Berro.

In 1973, a military coup took power in Uruguay; Galeano was imprisoned and later was forced to flee. His book Open Veins of Latin America was banned by the right-wing military government, not only in Uruguay, but also in Chile and Argentina. . He settled in Argentina where he founded the cultural magazine, Crisis. In 1976 he married for the third time to Helena Villagra, however in the same year the Videla regime took power in Argentina in a bloody military coup and his name was added to the lists of those condemned by the death squads. He fled again, this time to Spain, where he wrote his famous trilogy: Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire).

At the beginning of 1985 Galeano returned to Montevideo, where he continues to live. Following the victory of Tabaré Vázquez and the Broad Front alliance in the 2004 Uruguayan elections marking the first left-wing government in Uruguayan history Galeano wrote a piece for The Progressive titled "Where the People Voted Against Fear" in which Galeano showed support for the new government and concluded that the Uruguayan populace used "common sense" and were "tired of being cheated" by the traditional Colorado and Blanco parties. Following the creation of TeleSUR, a pan-Latin American television station based in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2005 Galeano along with other left-wing intellectuals such as Tariq Ali and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel joined the network's 36 member advisory committee.

In 2006, Galeano signed a petition in support of the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States of America.

On February 10, 2007, Galeano underwent a successful operation to treat lung cancer. During an interview with journalist Amy Goodman following Barack Obama's election as President of the United States in November 2008, Galeano said, "The White House will be Barack Obama's house in the time coming, but this White House was built by black slaves. And I’d like, I hope, that he never, never forgets this." At the April 17, 2009, opening session of the 5th Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave a copy of Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America to U.S. President Barack Obama, who was making his first diplomatic visit to the region. This made the English language edition of the book go to #2 position and the Spanish version to #11 on the Amazon.com bestseller list.

In a May 2009 interview he spoke about his past and recent works, some of which deal with the relationships between freedom and slavery, and democracies and dictatorships; "... not only the United States, also some European countries, have spread military dictatorships all over the world. And they feel as if they are able to teach democracy...". He also talked about how and why he has changed his writing style, and his recent rise in popularity.

Works

Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) is arguably Galeano's best-known work. In this book, he analyzes the history of Latin America as a whole from the time period of European contact with the New World to contemporary Latin America arguing against European and later U.S. economic exploitation and political dominance over the region. It was the first of his many books to be translated by Cedric Belfrage into English. It is a classic among scholars of Latin American history. The book gained popularity in the English-speaking world after the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave it as a gift to the American President Barack Obama.

Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire) is a three-volume narrative of the history of America, North and South. The characters are historical figures; generals, artists, revolutionaries, workers, conquerors and the conquered, who are portrayed in brief episodes which reflect the colonial history of the continent. It starts with pre-Columbian creation myths and ends in the 1980s. It highlights not only the colonial oppression that the continent underwent but particularly the long history of resistance, from individual acts of heroism to mass revolutionary movements.

Memoria del fuego is widely praised by reviewers. Galeano was compared to John Dos Passos and Gabriel García Márquez. Ronald Wright wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: "Great writers... dissolve old genres and found new ones. This trilogy by one of South America's most daring and accomplished authors is impossible to classify."

In New York Times Book Review Jay Parini praised as perhaps his most daring work The Book of Embraces, a collection of short, often lyrical stories presenting Galeano's views on emotion, art, politics, and values, as well as offering a scathing critique of modern capitalistic society and views on an ideal society and mindset. (The Book of Embraces was the last book Cedric Belfrage translated before he died in 1991.)

Galeano is also an avid Soccer fan; in his chidlhood, Galeano had the dream of becoming a soccer player and this desire is the subject of some of his writings, among them Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1995), a review of the history of the game. Galeano compares it with a theater performance and with war; he criticizes its unholy alliance with global corporations but attacks leftist intellectuals who reject the game and its attraction to the broad masses for ideological reasons.

Galeano's Espejos (Mirrors) is Galeano's most expansive work since Memory of Fire. Galeano offers a broad mosaic of history told through the voices of the unseen, unheard, and forgotten. Recalling the lives of artists, writers, gods and visionaries, Galeano's makes "lore out of the mass of history and stories that make this world, and make us human." (Rick Simonson) Mirrors is set to be published in the US in English by Nation Books in June 2009.

Galeano is a regular contributor to The Progressive and the New Internationalist, and has also been published in the Monthly Review and The Nation.

Awards and honors

The Stig Dagerman Prize – 2010

Bibliography

Los días siguientes (1963)

China (1964)

Guatemala (1967 - Guatemala: Occupied Country)

Reportajes (1967)

Los fantasmas del día del léon y otros relatos (1967)

Su majestad el fútbol (1968)

La crisis económica (1969)

Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971) Open Veins of Latin America ISBN 0-85345-279-2 ; ISBN 0-85345-990-8

Siete imágenes de Bolivia (1971)

Violencía y enajenación (1971)

Crónicas latinoamericanas (1972)

Vagamundo (1973) ISBN 84-7222-307-8

La cancion de nosotros (1975) ISBN 84-350-0124-5

Conversaciones con Raimón (1977) ISBN 84-7432-034-8

Días y noches de amor y de guerra (1978) ISBN 84-7222-891-6 Days and Nights of Love and War ISBN 0-85345-620-8

La piedra arde (1980)

Voces de nuestro tiempo (1981) ISBN 84-8360-237-7

Memoria del fuego (1982–1986) ISBN 84-323-0439-5 Memory of Fire ISBN 0-394-54805-1 (v. 1)

Guatemala: un pueblo en lucha (1983) ISBN 84-85781-18-X

Aventuras de los jóvenes dioses (1984)

Ventana sobre Sandino (1985)

Contraseña (1985) ISBN 950-9413-06-2

El descubrimiento de América que todavía no fue y otros escritos (1986) ISBN 84-7668-105-4

El tigre azul y otros artículos (1988)

Entrevistas y artículos (1962–1987) (1988)

El libro de los abrazos (1989) ISBN 84-323-0670-3 The Book of Embraces ISBN 0-393-02960-3

Nosotros decimos no (1989) ISBN 84-323-0675-4 We Say No ISBN 0-393-30898-7

América Latina para entenderte mejor (1990)

Palabras: antología personal (1990)

An Uncertain Grace with Fred Ritchin, photographs by Sebastiao Salgado (1990) ISBN 0-89381-421-0

Ser como ellos y otros artículos (1992) ISBN 84-323-0761-0

Amares (1993)

Las palabas andantes (1993) ISBN 84-323-0814-5 Walking Words ISBN 0-393-03782-7

Úselo y tírelo (1994) ISBN 950-742-542-X

El fútbol a sol y sombra (1995) ISBN 84-323-0879-X Football (soccer) in Sun and Shadow ISBN 1-85984-848-6

Mujeres (1996) ISBN 968-6719-51-2

Apuntes para el fin de siglo: antología (1997) ISBN 950-860-055-1

100 relatos breves: antología (1998?) ISBN 950-860-066-7

Patas arriba: la escuela del mundo al revés (1998) 8432309745 Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (2000) ISBN 0-8050-6375-7

I Am Rich Potosi: The Mountain That Eats Men photographs by Stephen Ferry (1999)

Tejidos: antología (2001) ISBN 84-8063-500-2

Bocas del Tiempo (2004) ISBN 9974-620-16-3 Voices of time: a life in stories ISBN 978-0-8050-7767-4

Espejos: Una historia casi universal (2008) ISBN 978-84-323-1314-1

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009) ISBN 1568584237

See also

List of Uruguayan writers

Culture of Uruguay

References

External links

Interview with Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano, "The Devil's Devils" (Trans. Mark K. Jensen), Le Monde diplomatique, no. 617 (August 2005), p. 10.

Sandra Cisneros reads "Los Nadies/The Nobodies" by Eduardo Galeano from Book of Embraces, El libro de los abrazos (1989) "".

"'Voices of Time': Legendary Uruguayan Writer Eduardo Galeano on Immigration, Latin America, Iraq, Writing – and Soccer," Democracy Now! 19 May 2006

"Reflections from Eduardo Galeano," The Leonard Lopate Show, 19 May 2006.

"Writer Without Borders" -- interview by Scott Widmer on In These Times

"Author of the Month," Escritores.org

Eduardo Galeano Articles Third World Traveler

The Guardian: Chávez creates overnight bestseller with book gift to Obama

Eduardo Galeano Interviewed by Jonah Raskin by Monthly Review, October 2009

Uruguayan Author Eduardo Galeano Returns with Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone - video report by Democracy Now!

Category:Uruguayan journalists Category:Uruguayan writers Category:Uruguayan novelists Category:Uruguayan socialists Category:Uruguayan Christian socialists Category:Writers on Latin America

Category:Uruguayan expatriates in Argentina Category:Uruguayan expatriates in Spain Category:People from Montevideo Category:1940 births Category:Living people