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Computation is any type of calculation^[1] or the use of computer technology in Information processing.^[2][3] Computation is a process following a well-defined model understood and expressed in an algorithm, protocol, network topology, etc. Computation is also a major subject matter of computer science: it investigates what can or cannot be done in a computational manner.

Look up computation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Classes of computation[link]

Computation can be classified by at least three orthogonal criteria: digital vs analog, sequential vs parallel vs concurrent, batch vs interactive.

In practice, digital computation is often used to simulate natural processes (for example, Evolutionary computation), including those that are more naturally described by analog models of computation (for example, Artificial neural network).

Computations as a physical phenomenon[link]

A computation can be seen as a purely physical phenomenon occurring inside a closed physical system called a computer. Examples of such physical systems include digital computers, mechanical computers, quantum computers, DNA computers, molecular computers, analog computers or wetware computers. This point of view is the one adopted by the branch of theoretical physics called the physics of computation.

An even more radical point of view is the postulate of digital physics that the evolution of the universe itself is a computation - Pancomputationalism.

Mathematical models of computation[link]

In the theory of computation, a diversity of mathematical models of computers have been developed. Typical mathematical models of computers are the following:

• State models including Turing Machine, push-down automaton, finite state automaton, and PRAM
• Functional models including lambda calculus
• Logical models including logic programming
• Concurrent models including actor model and process calculi

History[link]

The word computation has an archaic meaning (from its Latin etymological roots), but the word has come back in use with the arising of a new scientific discipline: computer science.

Comparison to calculation[link]

• See Calculation#Comparison to computation

See also[link]

Computer Science portal

• Computing
• Physical information
• Real computation
• Reversible computation
• Hypercomputation

References[link]

This computer science article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Anthony John Grenville Hey CBE FREng FIET FInstP FBCS (born 1946) is a researcher and educator across a range of science and engineering fields. After training in physics, he then worked in computer science and its application to education and other research fields in the US as well as the UK.

Biography[link]

Anthony John Grenville Hey was born on 17 August 1946.^[1] He graduated with a B.A. degree in physics in 1967, and a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1970, both from Worcester College, Oxford. From 1970 through 1972 he was a postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Moving to Pasadena, California, he worked with Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.^[2] He then moved to Geneva, Switzerland and worked as a fellow at CERN (the European organization for nuclear research) for two years. Hey worked about thirty years as an academic at University of Southampton, starting in 1974 as a particle physicist. He spent 1978 as a visiting fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For 1981 he returned to Caltech as a visiting research professor. There he learned of Carver Mead's work on very-large-scale integration and become interested in applying parallel computing techniques to large-scale scientific simulations.

Hey worked with British semiconductor company INMOS on the Transputer project in the 1980s. He switched to computer science in 1985, and in 1986 became professor of computation in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton. While there, he was promoted to Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science in 1994 and and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science in 1999. Among his work was "doing research on Unix with tools like LaTeX."^[3] In 1990 he was a visiting fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM Research. He then worked with Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel and David Walker, to define the Message Passing Interface (MPI) which became a de-facto open standard for parallel scientific computing.^[4] In 1998 he was a visiting research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA.^[5]

Hey led the UK's e-Science Programme from March 2001 to June 2005. He was appointed corporate vice-president of technical computing at Microsoft on 27 June 2005.^[6] Later he became corporate vice president of external research, and in 2011 corporate vice president of Microsoft research connections.^[7]

Hey is the editor of the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. Among other scientific advisory boards in Europe and the United States, he is a member of the Global Grid Forum Advisory Committee.

Awards[link]

Hey had an open scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford from 1963 to 1967, won the Scott Prize for Physics in 1967, senior scholarship to St John's College, Oxford in 1968 and was a Harkness Fellow from 1970 through 1972.^[1] Hey was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005. He became a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1996, the Institute of Physics and the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1996 and the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2001.^[1] In 2007 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree from Newcastle University.^[2]

Publications[link]

• with Patrick Walters (1987). The Quantum Universe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-31845-7. 
• Richard Phillips Feynman (2000) [1996]. Feynman Lectures on Computation. Perseus Books. ISBN 978-0-7382-0296-9. 
• with Patrick Walters (1997). Einstein's Mirror. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43532-1. 
• — (2002) [1999]. Feynman and Computation: Exploring the limits of computers. Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-4039-5. 
• (with Patrick Walters)
• with Patrick Walters (2005) [2003]. The New Quantum Universe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56457-1. 
• — (2009). The Fourth Paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery. Microsoft Research. ISBN 978-0-9825442-0-4. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• Tony Hey visits Nature

Stephen Wolfram
Born	(1959-08-29) 29 August 1959 (age 52) London, England, UK
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics, Physics, Computing
Institutions	Wolfram Research
Alma mater	Oxford University, Caltech
Known for	Creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha Author of A New Kind of Science
Notable awards	MacArthur Fellowship

Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British scientist^[1] and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.

Biography[link]

Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933.^[2][3] Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.^[4] He has a younger brother, Conrad.^[5]

Wolfram was educated at Eton, where he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students' math homework for money.^[4] Wolfram published an article on particle physics^[6] but claimed to be bored and left Eton prematurely in 1976.^[7] He entered St John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful".^[4] Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18^[3] and nine other papers^[4] before leaving in 1978 without graduating.^[7] He received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,^[8] joined the faculty there and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21.^[7] According to Google Scholar Stephen Wolfram is cited by over 30,000 publications (up to April 2012) and has an h-index of 58. ^[9]

Wolfram's work with Geoffrey Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used today in experimental particle physics.^[10] Wolfram is married to a mathematician and has four children.^[11]

Wolfram received a standing ovation^[12] for his 2010 TED Talk, Computing the theory of everything^[13], as well as his 2012 talk at SXSW, where he was named Speaker of the Event^[14].

Work[link]

Symbolic Manipulation Program[link]

Wolfram led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981. A dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in commercial ventures—eventually caused him to resign from Caltech.^[15] SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.

Complex systems and cellular automata[link]

In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he studied cellular automata, mainly with computer simulations. He produced a series of papers systematically investigating the class of elementary cellular automata, conceiving the Wolfram code, a naming system for one-dimensional cellular automata, and a classification scheme for the complexity of their behavior. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton may be Turing complete. In the middle 1980s Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman.^[16] and helped ignite the field of complex systems founding the first institute devoted to this subject, The Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign^[17] and the journal Complex Systems in 1987.^[18]

Mathematica[link]

In 1986 Wolfram left the Institute for Advanced Study for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he founded their Center for Complex Systems Research and started to develop the computer algebra system Mathematica, which was first released in 1988, when he left academia. In 1987 he co-founded a company called Wolfram Research which continues to develop and market the program.^[3]

[edit] A New Kind of Science

From 1992 to 2002, he worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science, which presents an empirical study of very simple computational systems. Additionally, it argues that for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand complexity in nature. Wolfram's conclusion is that the universe is digital in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws which can be described as simple programs. He predicts a realization of this within the scientific communities will have a major and revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry and biology and the majority of the scientific areas in general, which is the reason for the book's title.

Since the release of the book in 2002, Wolfram has split his time between developing Mathematica and encouraging people to get involved with the subject matter of A New Kind of Science by giving talks, holding conferences, and starting a summer school devoted to the topic.^[19]

Computational knowledge engine[link]

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram|Alpha, an answer engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface, launched on May 16, 2009 ^[20][21] and a Pro version launched on February 8, 2012^[22] The engine is based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and answers queries using the approach described in A New Kind of Science. The application programming interface (API) allows other applications to extend and enhance Alpha.^[23] Wolfram|Alpha is the answer engine behind Microsoft's Bing^[24] and Apple's Siri (along with Google and Yelp!) answering factual questions.^[25]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Stephen Wolfram

• Official website
• Wolfram Research blog to which Stephen Wolfram contributes
• Stephen Wolfram at TED Conferences
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Stephen Wolfram on Charlie Rose
• Works by or about Stephen Wolfram in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• TWiT - Triangulation 7: Stephen Wolfram (Audio podcast)

Michael Fredric Sipser is a professor of Applied Mathematics in the Theory of Computation Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Manuel Blum.

His research area is complexity theory, but he is also active in other related areas. In joint work with Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann, he introduced Adiabatic quantum computing.

He is the author of Introduction to the Theory of Computation (ISBN 0-534-95097-3), a standard textbook in the study of theoretical computer science.

He is currently (2011) serving as head of the MIT Mathematics department.^[1]

Notes[link]

1. ^ http://www-math.mit.edu/people/listing.php

External links[link]

• Sipser's personal homepage at MIT
• Michael Sipser at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Description of Sipser's research by Richard J. Lipton

This article about an American mathematician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow signing a book during June 2010.
Born	(1971-07-17) July 17, 1971 (age 40) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Author, blogger
Genres	Science fiction, postcyberpunk
Notable work(s)	Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother
Notable award(s)	John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award
Spouse(s)	Alice Taylor
Children	Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow
Influences William Gibson [1]
craphound.com

Cory Efram Doctorow (/ˈkɒri ˈdɒktəroʊ/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British^[2] blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and "post-scarcity" economics.^[3]

Life and career[link]

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers,^[4] Doctorow was raised in a Jewish activist^[5] household. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan^[6] and Doctorow became involved with nuclear disarmament activism and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, an anarchistic "free school" in Toronto, and attended four universities without attaining a degree. ^{[7] [8]}

He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative in Big Rideau Lake in Ontario.

During 1992 Doctorow went on a volunteer visit to Costa Rica with Youth Challenge International (YCI), which he found "profoundly good and profoundly enriching".^[9]

During June 1999, he co-initiated the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn. The company was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario during the summer of 2003.^[3]

Doctorow relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years,^[3] helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time during January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.^[3]

He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission,^[10] the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.^[3][11]

He then returned to London. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

During 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He was formerly a student in the program during 1993-94, but quit without completing a thesis.

Doctorow married Alice Taylor on Sunday, October 26, 2008,^[12] and together they have one daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born during 2008.^[13] Cory became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.^[2]

Other work and fellowships[link]

He served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America during 1999.

Together with Austrian art group monochrom he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, for which people from all over the world are asked to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.^[14]

At the 2003 Torcon 3 World Science Fiction Convention, Doctorow was a featured guest.^{[citation needed]}

On October 31, 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics.^[15]

Cory Doctorow at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006

Doctorow is a regular contributor to the TVOntario podcast Search Engine, formerly on CBC.

Fiction[link]

Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old and sold several stories followed by publication of his story "Craphound" during 1998.^[16]

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published during January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licences, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works. The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition. During March 2003, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons licence that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. It was nominated for a Nebula Award,^[17] and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel during 2004. A semi-sequel short story named Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.^[18]

Doctorow's other novels have been released with Creative Commons licences that allow derived works and prohibit commercial usage, and he has used the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that print versions are published.

His Sunburst Award-winning short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, was also published during 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.^[19]

Doctorow (left) pictured at the 2006 Lift Conference with fellow Boing Boing contributor Jasmina Tešanović (centre) and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling (right).

Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence.^[20] It was nominated for a 2009 Hugo Award, and won the 2009 Prometheus Award,^[21] Sunburst Award,^[22] and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

His novel Makers was released during October 2009, and is being serialized for free on the Tor Books website.^[23]

Doctorow's newest young adult novel, For The Win, was released during May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper format by Tor Books. The book concerns massively multiplayer online role-playing games.^[24]

Doctorow's short story collection "With a Little Help" was released in printed format on May 3, 2011. It is a project to demonstrate the profitability of Doctorow's method of releasing his books in print and subsequently for free under Creative Commons.^[25][26]

In September, 2012, Doctorow will release The Rapture of The Nerds, novel written in collaboration with Charles Stross.^[27]

Nonfiction and other writings[link]

Doctorow's nonfiction works include his first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder and published during 2000), and his contributions to Boing Boing, the weblog he co-edits, as well as regular columns in the magazines Popular Science and Make. He is a Contributing Writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe. During 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself.

Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer for the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.^[28]

He popularized the term "metacrap" by a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia."^[29] Some of his non-fiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon Publications as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future.

Opinions on intellectual property[link]

Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing.^[30] He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media, and copyright laws should only be operative when someone attempts to sell a product currently under someone else's copyright.

Doctorow is an opponent of Digital Rights Management, claiming that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices).^[31]

In popular culture[link]

Cory Doctorow wears a red cape, goggles and a balloon as he receives the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, spoofing an xkcd webcomic in which he is mentioned.

The webcomic xkcd occasionally features a partially fictional version of Doctorow who lives in a hot air balloon "up in" the "blogosphere" ("above the tag clouds") and wears a red cape and goggles, such as in the comic "Blagofaire".^[32] When Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon.^[33]

Awards[link]

• 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer^[34]
• 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• 2004 Sunburst Award for A Place So Foreign and Eight More
• 2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award^[35]

For Little Brother

• 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award^[36]
• 2009 Prometheus Award^[21]
• 2009 Sunburst Award^[22]
• 2009 White Pine Award^[37]

Bibliography[link]

Science fiction novels[link]

• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Tor. 2003. ISBN 0-7653-0436-8.  with a Creative Commons licence
• Eastern Standard Tribe. Tor. 2004. ISBN 0-7653-0759-6.  with a Creative Commons licence
• Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Tor. 2005. ISBN 0-7653-1278-6.  and with a Creative Commons licence.
• Little Brother. Tom Doherty Associates. 2008. ISBN 0-7653-1985-3.  and with a Creative Commons licence
• Makers. Tor. 2009. ISBN 0-7653-1279-4.  and with a Creative Commons licence.
• For The Win. Tor. 2010. ISBN 0-7653-2216-1.  and with a Creative Commons licence.
• Pirate Cinema. Tor. October 12, 2012. ISBN 0-7653-2908-5.  and with a Creative Commons licence.

Short stories and anthologies[link]

• 0wnz0red, short story, 2002
• Truncat (short story) -- a quasi-sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003.
• A Place So Foreign and Eight More (short story collection, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
• I, Robot (Hugo nominated short story, InfiniteMatrix.net, 2005)
• Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (short story collection, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007) ISBN 1-56025-981-7
• Scroogled originally appeared in the magazine Radar, 2007.
• True Names, (short story with Benjamin Rosenbaum) in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, ISBN 978-1-59102-692-1, 2008
• There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow / Now is the Best Time of Your Life (97 pgs.; in an edited anthology, 2010)^[16]
• With a Little Help, (short stories collection, December 2010)
• Chicken Little (from short story anthology, Gateways, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, April 2011).

Other[link]

• Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. (February 12, 2004)
• Glenn Yeffeth, ed., The Anthology at the End of the Universe?, chapter titled "Wikipedia: A Genuine H2G2-Minus the Editors", by Cory Doctorow, Benbella Books ISBN 1-932100-56-3.
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (self-help, Alpha Books, 2000).
• Essential Blogging (tech help, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002). ISBN 0-596-00388-9.
• /usr/bin/god (novel; Tor Books) — In a June 11, 2008 interview with the Onion's A.V. Club, Doctorow stated that the book was "on the shelf more or less permanently, although it might be resurrected at some point".^[38]
• Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (September, 2008).
• Context: Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century (October, 2011)^[39]
• The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (November, 2011)^[40]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Cory Doctorow

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Cory Doctorow

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cory Doctorow

• Doctorow, Corey at the Open Directory Project
• Cory Doctorow's personal website
• Boing Boing blog
• BookBanter interviews Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow's USC Course
• Cory Doctorow at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• When Cory Doctorow Ruled the World (February 2007 interview, with link to audio)
• Video of keynote speech at LIFT06 conference
• Video of Cory Doctor's lecture, "Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: the state of play in the global copyfight" at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival
• Manifesto for a virtual revolution: 2010 interview with Tom Chatfield, discussing For the Win and cyber-activism
• Rethinking Privacy in an Age of Disclosure and Sharing discussion with Peter Barron, Claire Fox, Norman Lewis of Wireless Grids Corporation, and Anna Minton at The Institute of Ideas, October 2009
• For the Win book talk at Books Inc., May 2010
• Several electronic books (eBooks) written by Cory Doctorow are available in the Works by Cory Doctorow at Project Gutenberg for free.