Contributors

William Aspray
William Aspray is the Bill and Lewis Suit Professor of Information Technologies in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also holds an appointment on the faculty of the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs. He has formerly held teaching positions at Harvard, Indiana, Penn, Virginia Tech, and Williams, served in management positions at the Charles Babbage Institute, Computing Research Association, and the IEEE History Center. His research involves the history, policy, and social study of information technology, mathematics, and electrical technologies. His most recent book is The Internet and American Business, coedited with Paul Ceruzzi for MIT Press, 2008. Current projects include a book on the informatics of diabetes (with Barbara Hayes of Indiana University), a history of privacy, and a study of the history of information in everyday American life.

Jonathan P. Bowen
Jonathan P. Bowen, FRSA, FBCS, is Chair of Museophile Limited, a museum and IT consultancy company. He is also a Visiting Professor at King's College London and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University. In 2007 he was a visiting academic at University College London and in 2008 was a visiting academic at Brunel University and worked on a large high integrity software engineering project. Previously he was at the University of Reading, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and Imperial College, London. He has been involved with the field of computing in both industry and academia since 1977. As well as computer science, his interests extend to online museums and the history of computing. Bowen established the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp, http://vlmp.icom.museum) in 1994, a web-based directory of museum web sites worldwide that has been adopted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). He was Honorary Chair at the first ‘Museums and the Web’ conference in 1997 and has contributed to each of the annual MW conferences since then. He guest edited two special issues of the Museums International journal concerning on-line museums and has co-chaired several of the EVA London conferences on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts. In 2002, Bowen founded Museophile Limited with the aim of helping museums online, especially in the areas of web accessibility, discussion forums, personalization, search engine visibility and wikis. He is an enthusiastic contributor to Wikipedia in the area of museums and on computing topics. He also founded the Museums Wiki on Wikia (http://museums.wikia.com). Bowen is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and of the British Computer Society.

Frank Carter
After graduating, Frank Carter worked for a short time in industry, assisting with the design and evaluation of optical systems, including lenses for cameras; in the pre-computer age this involved much tedious numerical work using five and sometimes seven figure mathematical tables. However, for the major part of his career Carter was involved in education in a number of capacities, mainly teaching maths and physics in schools and colleges. Later he had a senior role in preparing students to teach (the postgraduate certificate in education) and providing in-service courses for qualified teachers of mathematics. Since retirement Carter has carried out voluntary work for the Bletchley Park Trust, researching on the wartime work of the code-breakers, writing material for publication by the Trust, giving lectures, and also acting as a tour guide.

B. Jack Copeland
Jack Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he is also Head of Humanities and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. Jack received his D.Phil. in mathematical logic from the University of Oxford. He was on the faculty of universities in Australia and the United Kingdom before joining UC. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Sydney, Aarhus, and Melbourne, and a senior fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include Artificial Intelligence (Oxford: Blackwell 1993; second edition forthcoming), The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press 2004), Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (Oxford University Press 2005), and Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press 2006; new edition 2010).

Leo Corry
Leo Corry is Director of the Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, and editor of Science in Context. His main research interest is in the history of modern mathematics, a topic on which he has published extensively. His publications (available at his website) include: ‘Writing the Ultimate Mathematical Textbook: Nicolas Bourbaki's Éléments de mathématique’, in Eleanor Robson et al (eds.) Handbook of the History of Mathematics, Oxford University Press, and ‘Calculating the Limits of Poetic License: Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics’, Configurations 15 (3) (2009).

Eli Dresner
Eli Dresner received his PhD in Logic and Methodology of Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, and is currently a senior lecturer in philosophy and communication at Tel Aviv University. His research interests are in the philosophy of language, logic and the philosophy of computing. In his recent work he has been applying measurement-theoretic concepts to questions in formal semantics and the theory of meaning. Some of his work has been published in Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Philosophical Logic and Minds and Machines.

Michael Mahoney
Michael S. Mahoney was a Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University. He divided his teaching and research between the history of mathematical science from antiquity to 1700 and the history of technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. His books include The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat (Princeton, 1973; 2nd ed. 1994) and René Descartes, The World (Le Monde) (Abaris, 1979). He has also written studies of Huygens, Barrow, and Newton and has written more generally on the development of algebra and analysis during the 17th century, as well as on ancient and medieval mathematics. More recently, Mahoney was engaged in a study of the origins of theoretical computer science during the 1950s and 1960s and the development of software engineering. He served as director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for Secondary School Teachers focused on ‘Technology and the Human Experience’, and he chaired an advisory panel on computer software and intellectual property for the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment.

John McCarthy
John McCarthy, Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Stanford University, is universally recognized as one of the fathers of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), a term that he coined. His research led him to develop LISP, the language used in most expert systems and natural language programs today. McCarthy was one of the first to propose and design time-sharing computer systems, and he pioneered the application of mathematical logic for proving the correctness of computer programs. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. McCarthy received the Association for Computing Machinery's prestigious Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the Kyoto Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences.

Teresa Numerico
Teresa Numerico recieved her PhD in history of science and is a lecturer in logic and philosophy of science at the University of Rome, where she teaches logic and communication at the postgraduate level. Her publications include Alan Turing and Machine Intelligence (FrancoAngeli, 2005) and a book on search engines, Web Dragons (with I. Witten and M. Gori; Morgan Kaufmann, 2007). She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2004–2005. Her research interests range from history and philosophy of computer science to social informatics and the ethical and political consequences of the massive use of technology in society.

Eli Shamir
Eli Shamir is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He recieved his PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University in 1963. Together with Michael Rabin he initiated computer science education at the Hebrew University and as Chair of the Institute of Mathematics he created an independent Institute of Computer Science. His research includes work on the theory of partial differential and singular-integral operators, formal grammars and foundations of computability, random graphs and random structures, computational-statistical learning theory, and its application to semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. He was the first to apply martingale methods in random graphs. He is currently involved in the politics of the Israeli public health system.

Doron D. Swade
Doron D. Swade (MBE, PhD, MSc, C.Eng, FBCS, CITP) is an engineer, historian, a museum professional and a leading authority on the life and work of computer pioneer Charles Babbage. He was formerly Assistant Director and Head of Collections at the Science Museum, London, and before that, Senior Curator of Computing. Swade studied physics, electronic engineering, philosophy of science, machine intelligence, and history, at various universities including Cambridge University and University College London. He has consulted for the computer industry in the UK and US, and has designed interactive educational computer-based exhibits for public environments for some ten years. He is currently Visiting Professor at Portsmouth University, and Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London. He lectures widely and has authored three books (one co-authored) and some eighty scholarly and popular articles on curatorship, museology, and history of computing. He was awarded an MBE in 2009 for Services to the History of Computing.

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