Jewish Computer Scientists

Shafi Goldwasser and the Zero Knowledge Proof

Shafi Goldwasser, one of the greatest living computer scientists, won the Turing Award in 2012 (equivalent to a Nobel Prize). Her work helped turn cryptography from a dark art into a science. If you’ve ever used a credit card through a web browser, for example, her work was helping you stay secure. Her greatest achievement, with Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, is the “Zero knowledge proof”…. (read on)

Ludwig Wittgenstein: tautology and truth tables

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. His interest was in truth and he made contributions to logical thinking that are a foundation of computing. He invented the modern idea of tautology as something that is true whatever the situation and also popularised truth tables, now used as a simple way to understand logical operations and logical expressions … (read on)

Edith Windsor: gay marriage

Edie Schlain Windsor, who was a senior systems engineer at IBM and founding president of a software consulting company, led the landmark Supreme Court Case (United States versus Windsor) that led to gay marriage becoming legal in the US…. (read on)

Joseph Weizenbaum: ELIZA the first chatbot

Chatbots are now everywhere. The earliest successful one, called ELIZA, was, built in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum, who with his Jewish family had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Despite its simplicity ELIZA was very effective at fooling people into treating it as if it were a human.…. (read on)

Aaron and the art of art

Aaron is a successful American painter. Aaron’s delicate and colourful compositions on canvas sell well, and have been exhibited worldwide, in London’s Tate Modern gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for example. Oh and by the way, Aaron is a robot!… (read on)

More to come (of course)