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Friday Nite Videos | March 31, 2017

Portside
Trump/Nunes Story Gets Weirder. Bob Dylan | Nobel Prize. Nepotism, Impeachment & the Freedom Caucus. Tribute to Ahmed Kathrada. Parameter Ghosts.

19 Women Leading Math and Physics

Natalie Wolchover Quanta
Top women in mathematics and physics discuss how they got to where they are — and why there aren’t more of them.

The Bicentennial of George Boole, the Man Who Laid the Foundations of the Digital Age

Colm Mulcahy Scientific American
It wasn’t until almost a century after Boole’s pioneering work that the world caught up. Both Victor Shestakov at Moscow State University in 1935 and Claude Shannon at MIT in 1937 proposed using Boolean logic to design electrical switches, the latter’s work paving the way for a major shift in electrical engineering in the USA. By late 1948, Shannon had introduced what we now know as information theory, and digital computers soon followed.

The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation

Michael Nielsen Quanta Magazine
Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?
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