Upcoming lectures on two recent books

I’ll be a keynote speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE) in December. My topic is “Why and How to Teach the Classic Papers,” and I will be describing the experience of reading about 50 classic computer science papers with about 150 computer science students per year. The course is Harvard’s CS191, and I have collected the papers, each with a brief introduction, into an MIT Press volume Ideas That Created the Future, now in its third printing.  

This conference is in Hong Kong. I will be speaking remotely on the evening of December 4 Boston time, morning of December 5 in Hong Kong.

Also, I will be delivering (in person!) the annual Thoralf Skolem memorial lecture at the University of Oslo on the afternoon of December 8. Skolem was an influential mathematician and logician; several of my early papers were inspired by his work on reduction classes for the predicate calculus, through which I became a friend and collaborator of the combinatorial genius Stål Aanderaa (known to computer scientists mainly as one parent of the Aanderaa-Karp-Rosenberg conjecture). Among the delights of this honor is the opportunity to once again see my old friend, with whom I did some of the most challenging work of my career.

The subject of my Skolem lecture will be “The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic,” based on my edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of thirty-two of Leibniz’s writings on binary (about to be published by MIT Press).

Both of these talks will be aimed at non-specialists and should be of broad interest. I hope that the Skolem lecture will be livecast, but have not gotten confirmation about that yet.