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Little known outside his field, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a highly influential and often controversial figure in the history of computer science. Krzysztof Apt writes a tribute to his colleague, a pioneer and a genius whose work shaped the field like few others.
(1) COURT DECISION CURBS A LONGTIME COPYRIGHT REQUIREMENT. [Item by Anne Marble.] In 2018, print-on-demand publisher Valancourt Books sued the U.S. Copyright Office because of the "mandatory deposit" requirement -- where publishers are required to send U.S. Copyright Office copies of about 240 of the books they publish. They didn't have the books on hand
His angle was The End. A rollicking disquisition on Minimalism’s debt to science fiction, B-movies, and the second law of thermodynamics, Robert Smithson’s Artforum debut, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” linked the so-called primary structures of artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol Dewitt to entropy, that universal force of decay, which erodes everything into an all-engulfing sameness. “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future,” Smithson wrote. Cynical, sure, but his essay glimmers wit...
Fermat’s last theorem went unsolved for more than 350 years—and the role of the Tyler oil heir who funded its 1994 solution was largely unknown until this week.
James M. Vaughn Jr., wielding a fortune, argues that he brought about the Fermat breakthrough after the best and brightest had failed for centuries to solve the puzzle.