Biography:Neil Gershenfeld
Neil Gershenfeld | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Gershenfeld in 2010 | |
| Born | Neil Adam Gershenfeld December 1, 1959 Ardmore, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
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| Known for | Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer sciences |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | Representation of chaos (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | Watt W. Webb[citation needed] |
| Website | ng |
Neil Adam Gershenfeld (born December 1, 1959) is an American professor at MIT and the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, a sister lab to the MIT Media Lab. His research studies are predominantly focused in interdisciplinary studies involving physics and computer science, in such fields as quantum computing, nanotechnology, and personal fabrication. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Scientific American has named Gershenfeld one of their "Scientific American 50" for 2004 and has also named him Communications Research Leader of the Year.[1] Gershenfeld is also known for releasing the Great Invention Kit in 2008, a construction set that users can manipulate to create various objects.[2]
Gershenfeld has been featured in a variety of newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times [3] and The Economist,[4] and on NPR.[5] He was named as one of the 40 modern-day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry Chicago.[6] Prospect named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.[7]
Education
Gershenfeld attended Swarthmore College, where he graduated in 1981 with a B.A. degree in physics with high honors.[8] In 1990 he earned a Ph.D. in physics at Cornell University, titled Representation of chaos.[9]
Teaching career
In 1998, Gershenfeld started a class at MIT called "How to make (almost) anything". Gershenfeld wanted to introduce expensive, industrial-size machines to the technical students. However, this class attracted a lot of students from various backgrounds: artists, architects, designers, students without any technical background. In his interview to CNN, Gershenfeld said that "the students... were answering a question I didn't ask, which is: What is this stuff good for? And the answer is: Not to make what you can buy in stores, but to make what you can't buy in stores. It's to personalise fabrication".[10] Gershenfeld believes that this is the beginning of a new revolution: digital revolution in fabrication that will allow people to fabricate things, machines on demand.
Gershenfeld has presented his course on "How to make (almost) anything" at the Association of Professional Model Makers (APMM) 2010 Conference.[11]
This class later has led Gershenfeld to create Fab lab[12] in collaboration with Bakhtiar Mikhak at MIT. Gershenfeld feels very passionate about this project, as he believes that teaching kids how to use technology and create it themselves will empower the future generations to become more independent and create technology that each individual community needs, not a technology that is currently available on the market. Fab labs have spread around the world, having been established in the remotest of places and countries. In his interview with Discover magazine on the question what personal fabrication might be useful for, Gershenfeld said, "There is a surprising need for emergent technologies in many of the least developed places on the planet. While our needs might be fairly well met, there are billions of people on the planet whose needs are not. Their problems don't need incremental tweaks in current technology, but a revolution".[13]
As well as "How to make (almost) anything" class, Gershenfeld has started teaching the following classes: "How To Make Something That Makes (almost) Anything", "The Physics of Information Technology", "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling".[14]
Gershenfeld has been a keynote speaker at the Congress of Science and Technology Leaders (2015, 2016).
Research
Neil Gershenfeld and his students have done an extensive amount of research.[15] His research was published in Science as well as in The American Physical Society journal. Amongst many is the research on Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching,[16] Microfluidic Bubble Logic research,[17] Physical one-way functions.[18]
Bibliography
- Gershenfeld, Neil (1999). The Nature of Mathematical Modeling. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57095-4. https://books.google.com/books?id=lSTOh8U7NkkC.; 1st edition. 1998; hbk, 356 pages[19]
- Neil A. Gershenfeld (2000). When Things Start to Think. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-5880-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=EU0Fh97hmksC; 2000 pbk edition of 1999 hbk edition; Gershenfeld, Neil (1999). 1st edition. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-5874-1. (hbk)[20][21]
- Gershenfeld, Neil (2011). The Physics of Information Technology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-21022-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=d1WnngEACAAJ. 1st edition. 2000.[22]
- Gershenfeld, Neil (2011). Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop. ReadHowYouWant Limited. ISBN 978-1-4596-1057-6. https://books.google.com/books?id=rHdkDiUMpaUC. Gershenfeld, Neil A. (2005). 1st edition. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02745-3.[23]
- Gershenfeld, Neil; Gershenfeld, Alan; Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Joel (2017). Designing reality: How to survive and thrive in the third digital revolution. Basic Books. ISBN 9780465093489. https://books.google.com/books?id=HY6YDgAAQBAJ.[24] ebook ISBN 9780465093489
References
- ↑ "The Scientific American 50". Scientific American. December 2004. pp. 47. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D5CA6-D59B-118F-91DD83414B7F0000&pageNumber=2&catID=9.
- ↑ Greenberg, Andy. "Invention kits let you build (almost) anything". NBC News. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26319233/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/invention-kits-let-you-build-almost-anything/#.UdT9ojvFVqw.
- ↑ Giridharadas, Anand (May 13, 2011). "The Kitchen-Table Industrialists". https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/magazine/the-kitchen-table-industrialists.html?pagewanted=2.
- ↑ the printed edition (June 9, 2005). "How to make (almost) anything". http://www.economist.com/node/4031304.
- ↑ "The Making of a Personal Lab". NPR. November 11, 2005. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5008294.
- ↑ "Modern-Day Leonardos". Museum of Science and Industry Chicago. http://www.msichicago.org/scrapbook/scrapbook_exhibits/leonardo/modern/bios2/gershenfeld.html.
- ↑ "Intellectuals—the results". Prospect. July 26, 2008. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/100-top-public-intellectuals.
- ↑ "CV: Prof. Neil Gershenfeld". http://ng.cba.mit.edu/neil/cv.pdf.
- ↑ Gershenfeld, Neil (1990). Representation of chaos (Ph.D.). Cornell University. OCLC 64017404.
- ↑ Zakaria, Fareed (July 17, 2013). "On GPS: Future of digital fabrication". CNN website. http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/07/17/exp-gps-gershenfeld-3d-printing.cnn.html.
- ↑ "APMM 2010 Conference – Keynote Professor Neil Gershenfeld". Prototype Today. 2010. http://www.prototypetoday.com/apmm/apmm-2010-conference-keynote-professor-neil-gershenfeld.
- ↑ Tretkoff, Ernie (April 6, 2006). "Gershenfeld Hopes to Spearhead a Fab-ulous Revolution". American Physical Society. http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200604/gershenfeld.cfm.
- ↑ Svitil, Kathy A. (January 1, 2003). "Physicist Neil Gershenfeld—Time to Make the Computer Vanish". Discover (Kalmbach Publishing) 26 (1). http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jan/breakdialogue#.UdUBOTvFVqw. Retrieved July 22, 2014.
- ↑ Gershenfeld, Neil. "List of Neil Gershenfeld classes". http://ng.cba.mit.edu/neil/classes.html.
- ↑ "Neil Gershenfeld biography". http://ng.cba.mit.edu/neil/bio.html.
- ↑ Chuang, Isaac L.; Gershenfeld, Neil; Kubinec, Mark (1998). "Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching". Physical Review Letters (The American Physical Society) 80 (15): 3408–3411. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.3408. Bibcode: 1998PhRvL..80.3408C.
- ↑ Gershenfeld, Neil; Prakash, Manu (February 9, 2007). "Microfluidic Bubble Logic". Science 315 (5813): 832–5. doi:10.1126/science.1136907. PMID 17289994. Bibcode: 2007Sci...315..832P. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1136907. Retrieved April 26, 2014.
- ↑ Gershenfeld, Neil; Pappu, Ravikanth; Recht, Ben; Taylor, Jason (September 20, 2002). "Physical one-way functions". Science 297 (5589): 2026–30. doi:10.1126/science.1074376. PMID 12242435. Bibcode: 2002Sci...297.2026P. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1074376. Retrieved April 26, 2014.
- ↑ McKibben, Mark (January 18, 2001). "Review of The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil Gershenfeld". https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/the-nature-of-mathematical-modeling.
- ↑ "Review of When Things Start to Think by Neil Gershenfeld". January 4, 1999. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8050-5874-1.
- ↑ "Review of When Things Start to Think by Neil Gershenfeld". November 15, 1998. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/neil-gershenfeld/when-things-start-to-think.
- ↑ Yee, Danny (2001). "Review of The Physics of Information Technology by Neil Gershenfeld". https://science.slashdot.org/story/01/09/18/1918234/the-physics-of-information-technology. (See Slashdot.)
- ↑ "Review of Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication". Publishers Weekly. April 2005. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-465-02745-3.
- ↑ Shapira, Philip (2017). "Making the future (book review of Designing reality: How to survive and thrive in the third digital revolution)". Science 358 (6366): 1007.1–1007. doi:10.1126/science.aap9616. Bibcode: 2017Sci...358.1007S.
External links
- Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT
- Science magazine website
- American Physical Society website
- Fab Foundation website
- {{TED speaker}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
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