Gregory Chaitin
Gregory John Chaitin also known as Gregory Chaitin (born in Born::1947) is a renowned Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist.
|
Gregory John Chaitin |
|
Gregory John Chaitin |
Biography
Academic life and contributions
From a family of Jewish origin, he attended the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York[1], where he (still aged 18) developed the theories that led to his independent discovery of Kolmogorov complexity.[2][3][4] Ray Solomonoff had drawn up proposals related in 1960 so that this theory is also known as the Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solomonoff theory.[5] In his statements Chaitin and Kolmogorov argued that complexity is combined with compressibility and then in length, a concept of simple counting. [1] Another gifted mathematician who developed their work in City College of New York was the Polish-American logician Emil Post.[1]
In the 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a new incompleteness theorem, in opposition to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Chaiting developed a bottom-up allocation algorithm for graph coloring records, which uses a heuristic metric of cost/degree. In 1981 he published a paper on the algorithm (known asChaitin´s algorithm). In 1982 Chaitin publishes an extension of this algorithm in a paper presented in the symposium 1982 SIGPLAN Symposium on Compiler Construction.
Chaitin has defined Chaitin constant Ω, a real number whose digits are equi-distributed, and it is sometimes informally described as an expression of the probability that a random program is interrupted. Ω has the mathematical property that is decidable but not computable.
From 2009, Chaitin started working on a new field, the metabiology where he studies evolutionary theory of the artificial software as opposed to the evolution of "natural software". As s result of this work, Chaitin published the book in 2012 "Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical". Chaitin points out in his preface that the provocation for the creation of metabiology was the book The Devil's Delusion of his friend David Berlinski which offers a scathing critique of Darwinism.[6] Even disagreeing with his propositions, Gregory Chaitin maintains an attitude of respect for the proponents of Intelligent Design which absolutely is not commonplace among other opponents of ID.
The prof. Gregory Chaitin has two doctorates Honoris Causa: the first awarded in science in 1995 at the University of Maine and the second in the area of humanities and philosophy in 2009 from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. In 2002 he received the title of Honorary Professor of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. He is a former researcher at the IBM´s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and is now a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Personal Life
Gregory Chaitin is married Virginia Maria Gonçalves Sources Chaitin, [7] PhD in History of Sciences and Techniques Epistemology and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Virginia is currently pursuing his postdoctoral in Metabiology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, under Professor Ricardo Silva Kubrusly and co-supervision of Professor Gregory Chaitin.
Bibliography
- Information, Randomness & Incompleteness (World Scientific, 1987) [1]
- Algorithmic Information Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1987) online
- Information-Theoretic Incompleteness (World Scientific, 1992) online
- The Limits of Mathematics (Springer-Verlag, 1998),
- The Unknowable (Springer-Verlag, 1999),
- Exploring Randomness (Springer-Verlag, 2001),
- Conversations with a Mathematician (Springer-Verlag, 2002),
- From Philosophy to Program Size (Tallinn Cybernetics Institute 2003),
- Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega (Pantheon Books, 2005) (reeditado na Grã-Bretanha como Metamaths: The Quest for Omega, Atlantic Books, 2006),
- Teoria algoritmica della complessità (G. Giappichelli Editore 2006),
- Thinking about Gödel & Turing (World Scientific, 2007),
- Mathematics, Complexity and Philosophy (Editorial Midas 2011),
- Gödel's Way (CRC Press, 2012),
- Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical (Pantheon Books, 2012).
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Berlinski, David (2009). The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press. p. 151-152. ISBN 978-0-9790141-2-3.
- ↑ Li, Ming; Vitanyi, Paul M.B. (1997). An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications (2nd ed.). New York: Springer. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-38794868-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=LKEmB_GQ53QC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=snippet&f=false.
- ↑ Chaitin, G. J. (October 1966). "On the Length of Programs for Computing Finite Binary Sequences". Journal of the ACM 13 (4): 547–569.
- ↑ Dewdney, A.K. (1993). The New Turing Omnibus: 66 excursions in Computer Science. New York: Owl Books. p. 51. ISBN 978-0-8050-7166-5.
- ↑ Dembski, William A. (2002). No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 58-62. ISBN 978-0-7425-5810-6.
- ↑ Chaitin, Gregory (2012). Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical. New York: Pantheon Books. p. xv. ISBN 978-0-375-42314-7.
- ↑ Chaitin, Gregory. "Demostrando a Darwin:La Biología en Clave Matemática". Tusquets Editores. http://www.tusquetseditores.com/especiales/capitulos/Demostrando_a_Darwin_lectura.pdf.
External links
- Gregory Chaitin´s official site
- Video lecture on metabiology: "Life as evolving software"
- Video lecture about "Leibniz, complexity and incompleteness"
- New Scientist´s article about Chaitin, Omegas and SuperOmegas (March 2001)
- A short version of the proof of Chaitin
- Demonstrating Darwin (class)
- Lattes Curriculum of Virginia Maria Fontes Gonçalves Chaitin
- Conversations with a Mathematician called Gregory Chaitin
- Gregory Chaitin´s Register allocation and spilling via graph coloring
