George Dyson To Speak On Digital Computing

November 14, 2000: George Dyson, visiting lecturer and research associate at Western Washington University, will speak on "What If Artificial Life Isn't? The Origins of the Digital Universe at the Institute for Advanced Study" on November 29 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. A reception will follow. He will discuss the role of the Institute's Electronic Computer Project (1945-57) in the origins of digital computing.

A historian of technology, Dyson's personal and professional interests have ranged from the prehistory of the Aleut kayak to the evolution of digital computing and the exploration of space. His work on prehistoric craft has been featured in television documentaries and such publications as the New York Times ("Lessons From Ancients Who Plied the Waves") and Time magazine ("Resurrecting a Wondrous Craft").

He is author of Baidarka: The Kayak (1986); "Form and Function of the Baidarka: The Framework of Design" in Contributions to Kayak Studies (1991); Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (1997, 1998); and the forthcoming "Orion," which concerns Project Orion, the still-classified attempt to build a 4,000-ton nuclear-bomb-propelled interplanetary spaceship that took place between 1957 and 1965.

He attended Princeton High School, and the universities of California at San Diego and, later, Berkeley.

His early life and work, contrasted with that of his father, physicist and Institute professor emeritus Freeman Dyson, was the subject of Kenneth Brower's The Starship and the Canoe (1978).

The event is one of a series of public lectures sponsored by the Institute's School of Social Science during the academic year 2000-01 in connection with a projected year-long exploration of "Information Technology, New Media and the Social Sciences."