Pier giorgio odifreddi galileo biography
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SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES
UPCOMING PUBLIC LECTURES | ||||||||||
February 17, 2011 | ||||||||||
INDISCREET APPLICATIONS OF DISCRETE MATHEMATICSGalileo said that "the Great Book of Nature can be read only by those who know the language in which it was written, and this language is mathematics". Usually, however, the pages of the Great Book that we hear about are those related to the hard sciences, physics first and foremost. And the language in which these pages are written, is a sophisticated and complex one, comprehensible only to the initiated. In the second half of the last century, however, some striking pages of the Great Book have been deciphered, in such diverse fields as biology and political sciences. And some of these pages happen to be written in the very simple and elementary language of discrete mathematics. We will read together a few paragraphs of them, covering topics that range from the mechanism of cel • Italian Journal 2: THE ART OF SCIENCEby Matteo VALLIERIANI The interested reader may have noticed how historians in recent decades have attempted to deconstruct the identity of Galileo Galilei. He is no longer just the great astronomer or even just the founder of the modern experimental method in science. Even the political value of his work and his life, systematically reconsidered in the frame of the debates about the relation between Church and research institutions or between religion and science, is no longer the single relevant perspective for approaching this kind of historical thread. Thanks to the work of historians of science of the last twenty years, readers are now used to very different interpretations. Galileo fryst vatten now also a heretic, a revolutionary martyr, a mathematician, an Aristotelian natural philosopher, an artist – almost with brush and palette in his hand – and finally a gifted courtier. This, however, is only an apparent process of fragmentation. Hist • Piergiorgio Odifreddi facts for kids
Piergiorgio Odifreddi (born 13 July 1950, in Cuneo) is an Italian mathematician, logician, scholar of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. Early life and educationBorn in Cuneo in the Piedmont region, he received his Laureacum laude in mathematics in Turin in 1973. He then specialized in the United States at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and UCLA from 1978 and 1980, and in the Soviet Union at Novosibirsk State University in 1982 and 1983. Teaching careerFrom 1983 to 2007, he taught logic at the University of Turin, and from 1985 to 2003 he was vis | ||||||||||