Archive for the 'obits' Category

Spiderwoman RIP

Published
by
peter
on 2010-06-01
in Art, Minimalism and obits
. Closed

The death has occurred of artist Louise Bourgeois, aged 98.   I can’t say I liked or appreciated her art at all, most of which I found unsettling, sinister and off-putting.   Her art did not communicate anything pleasant or subtle, at least not to me, but perhaps that was her intention, or else I was not in her target audience.   Her art was also obsessive (all those spiders, for goodness sake!) and very literal-minded (every one of them with exactly 8 legs).  Somehow we expect our artists, of all people, to have more imagination than this.    Bourgeois appears to have been true to her own vision and to her own self, but that does not mean she was someone I would want to spend any time with.

Perhaps I was not the only person repelled by her art and the personality it revealed.   In gallery Dia: Beacon, upriver from New York City,  Bourgeois’ art is placed in a small upstairs room on its own, hidden away from the other work like some Mrs Rochester of the art world.  Perhaps the curators thought her work would infect the wonderful minimalist and conceptual art for which the gallery is rightly known; her work certainly seems out of place in this gallery.  As elsewhere, I found her art there unpleasant, and a whole room full was overwhelmingly repellent.  Indeed, the one great work in that room you only see as you descend the steps to leave, and is not by her or by any artist.  In this former printing factory, the wall next to the steps is the original external red-brick factory wall, covered in some places with a white dust, and left as it presumably was when the gallery took over the building.  This subtle, spiritual wall with its geometric pattern of red bricks overlaid with random splotches of white is the only interesting or pleasant artwork in the Bourgeois room at Dia:Beacon.  It says something about Bourgeois’ art (or perhaps about my taste) that the packaging here is much better art than any of the objects inside it.

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Vale: Mike Zwerin

Published
by
peter
on 2010-05-23
in Music and obits
. Closed

This is a belated farewell to Mike Zwerin (1930-2010), jazz trombonist and jazz correspondent for the International Herald Tribune.   An American in Paris, he was open in his musical tastes and usually generous in his criticisms; his IHT writings sustained many a long journey across far meridians, and helped sustain the cosmopolitan, expatriate feel that the IHT had last century (now sadly lost, since the NYT bought out the Washington Post and brought it home to Manhattan).  Obits:  London Times  and The Guardian.




Vale: Don Day

Published
by
peter
on 2010-05-22
in Decision theory, Heroes, Politics and obits
. Closed

This post is to mark the passing of Don Day (1924-2010), former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the so-called “Bearpit”, roughest of Australia’s 15 parliamentary assemblies) and former NSW Labor Minister.   I knew Don when he was my local MLA in the 1970s and 1980s, when he won a seat in what was normally ultra-safe Country Party (now National Party) country – first, the electorate of Casino, and then, Clarence.  Indeed, he was for a time the only Labor MLA in the 450 miles of the state north of Newcastle.  His win was repeated several times, and his seat was instrumental in Neville Wran’s suprise 1-seat majority in May 1976, returning Labor to power in NSW after 11 years in opposition, and after a searing loss in the Federal elections of December 1975.   In his role as Minister for Primary Industries and Decentralisation, Don was instrumental in saving rural industries throughout NSW.   Far North Coast dairy farmers were finally allowed to sell milk to Sydney households, for example, breaking the quota system, a protectionist economic racket which favoured only a minority of dairy farmers and that was typical of the policies of the Country Party.  Similarly, his actions saved the NSW sugar industry from closure.   NSW Labor’s rural policies were (and still are) better for the majority of people in the bush than those of the bush’s self-proclaimed champions.

Like many Labor representatives of his generation, Don Day had fought during WW II, serving in the RAAF.  After the war, he established a small business in Maclean.   He was one of the most effective meeting chairmen I have encountered:  He would listen carefully and politely to what people were saying, summarize their concerns fairly and dispassionately (even when he was passionate himself on the issues being discussed), and was able to identify quickly the nub of an issue or a way forward in a complex situation.  He could usually separate his assessment of an argument from his assessment of the person making it, which helped him be dispassionate.  Although The Grafton Daily Examiner has an obit here, I doubt he will be remembered much elsewhere on the web, hence this post.

Update (2010-06-12): SMH obit is here.

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Vale: Robin Milner

Published
by
peter
on 2010-03-31
in Computer Science, Computing-as-interaction and obits
. Closed

Robin Milner

The death has just occurred of Robin Milner (1934-2010), one of the founders of theoretical computer science.   Milner was an ACM Turing Award winner and his main contributions were a formal theory of concurrent communicating processes and, more recently, a category-theoretic account of hyperlinks and embeddings, his so-called theory of bigraphs.   As we move into an era where the dominant metaphor for computation is computing-as-interaction, the idea of concurrency has become increasingly important; however, understanding, modeling and managing it have proven to be among the most difficult conceptual problems in modern computer science.  Alan Turing gave the world a simple mathematical model of computation as the sequential writing or erasing of characters on a linear tape under a read/write head, like a single strip of movie film passing back and forth through a projector.  Despite the prevalence of the Internet and of ambient, ever-on, and ubiquitous computing, we still await a similar mathematical model of interaction and interacting processes.  Milner’s work is a major contribution to developing such a model. 

Robin was an incredibly warm, generous and unprepossessing man.   About seven years ago, without knowing him at all, I wrote to him inviting him to give an academic seminar; even though famous and retired, he responded positively, and was soon giving a very entertaining talk on bigraphs (a representation of which is on the blackboard behind him in the photo).  He joined us for drinks in the pub afterwards, buying his round like everyone else, and chatting amicably with all, talking both about the war in Iraq and the problems of mathematical models based on pre-categories.  He always responded immediately to any of my occasional emails subsequently.

The London Times has an obituary here, from which the photo is borrowed.

References:

Robin Milner [1989]: Communication and Concurrency. Prentice Hall.

Robin Milner [1999]: Communicating and Mobile Systems: the Pi-Calculus. Cambridge University Press.

Robin Milner [2009]: The Space and Motion of Communicating Agents. Cambridge University Press.

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Vale: George Leonard

Published
by
peter
on 2010-02-14
in Religion and obits
. Closed

Belatedly, I have just learnt of the death last month of George Leonard (1923-2010), writer, journalist, and aikidoka.  He took up aikido in middle age, a journey he wrote about movingly (see reference below), and ended up co-founding Aikido of Tamalpais.  His writings on life, the universe and everything have been very influential in my thinking about life, as I acknowledge here. 

The New York Times has an obit here and Quantum Tantra a tribute here.

Reference:

George Leonard [1985]: On getting a black belt at age fifty-two. pp. 78-98 in:  Richard Strozzi Heckler (Editor) [1985]: Aikido and the New Warriors.  Berkeley, CA, USA:  North Atlantic Books.   This volume also contains a reprint of Leonard’s fine account of Heckler’s aikido black belt examination, “This isn’t Richard” (pp. 198-205).

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Vale: Stephen Toulmin

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-09
in Argumentation, Computer Science, Computing-as-interaction, Logic, Philosophy of Language, Rhetoric and obits
. 3 Comments

The Anglo-American philosopher, Stephen Toulmin, has just died, aged 87.   One of the areas to which he made major contributions was argumentation, the theory of argument, and his work found and finds application not only in philosophy but in computer science.    

For instance, under the direction of John Fox, the Advanced Computation Laboratory at Europe’s largest medical research charity, Cancer Research UK (formerly, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund) applied Toulmin’s model of argument in computer systems they built and deployed in the 1990s to handle conflicting arguments in some domain.  An example was a system for advising medical practitioners with the arguments for and against prescribing a particular drug to a patient with a particular medical history and disease presentation.  One company commercializing these ideas in medicine is Infermed.    Other applications include the automated prediction of chemical properties such as toxicity (see for example, the work of Lhasa Ltd), and dynamic optimization of extraction processes in mining.

S E Toulmin

For me, Toulmin’s most influential work was was his book Cosmopolis, which identified and deconstructed the main biases evident in contemporary western culture since the work of Descartes:

  • A bias for the written over the oral
  • A bias for the universal over the particular
  • A bias for the general over the local
  • A bias for the timeless over the timely.

Formal logic as a theory of human reasoning can be seen as example of these biases at work. In contrast, argumentation theory attempts to reclaim the theory of reasoning from formal logic with an approach able to deal with conflicts and gaps, and with special cases, and less subject to such biases.    Norm’s dispute with Larry Teabag is a recent example of resistance to the puritanical, Descartian desire to impose abstract formalisms onto practical reasoning quite contrary to local and particular sense.

References:

S. E. Toulmin [1958]:  The Uses of Argument.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

S. E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis:  The Hidden Agenda of Modernity.  Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

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Vale Richard Meale

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-24
in Music and obits
. Closed

Australian composer Richard Meale (1932-2009) has just died at the age of 77.   He was perhaps Australia’s best expressionist, especially in moving early works such as Homage to Garcia Lorca, and Clouds Now And Then.   In his later years, like so many 20th-century Australian  modernist composers, he turned to writing late-romantic tosh, as if the only function of composers was to support the film industry.  In honour of his memory, I repeat the profound Basho haiku which he quoted on the score of Clouds Now And Then:

Clouds now and then,
Giving men relief
From moon-viewing.

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Vale William Safire

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-27
in Argumentation, Decision theory, Politics and obits
. 1 Comment

William Safire, a speech-writer for Richard Nixon and later an op-ed columnist with The New York Times, has just died.  To his memory, I retrieve a statement from his novel Full Disclosure, which nicely expresses a different model of decision-making to that taught in Decision Theory classes:

The truth about big decisions, Ericson mused, was that they never marched through logical processes, staff systems, option papers, and yellow pads to a conclusion.  No dramatic bottom lines, no Thurberian captains with their voices like thin ice breaking, announcing, “We’re going through!”    The big ones were a matter of mental sets, predispositions, tendencies – taking a lifetime to determine – followed by the battering of circumstance, the search for a feeling of what was right – never concluded at some finite moment of conclusion, but in the recollection of having “known” what the decision would be some indeterminate time before.  For weeks now, Ericson knew he had known he was ready to do what he had to do, if only Andy or somebody could be induced to come up with a solution that the President could then put through his Decision-Making Process. That made his decision a willingness not to obstruct, rather than a decision to go ahead, much like Truman’s unwillingness to stop the train of events that led to the dropping of the A-bomb – not on the same level of magnitude, but the same type of reluctant going-along.”  (pp. 491-492)

Reference:

William Safire [1977]:  Full Disclosure. (Garden City, NY, USA:  Doubleday and Company).

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Australian logic: a salute to Malcolm Rennie

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-27
in Heroes, Logic, Mathematics and obits
. Closed

Recently, I posted a salute to Mervyn Pragnell, a logician who was present in the early days of computer science.  I was reminded of the late Malcolm Rennie, the person who introduced me to formal logic, and whom I acknowledged here.   Rennie was the most enthusiastic and inspiring lecturer I ever had, despite using no multi-media wizardry, usually not even an overhead projector.  Indeed, he mostly just sat and spoke, moving his body as little as possible and writing only sparingly on the blackboard, because he was in constant pain from chronic arthritis.   He was responsible for part of an Introduction to Formal Logic course I took in my first year (the other part was taken by Paul Thom, for whom I wrote an essay on the notion of entailment in a system of Peter Geach).   The students in this course were a mix of first-year honours pure mathematicians and later-year philosophers (the vast majority), and most of the philosophers struggled with non-linguistic representations (ie, mathematical symbols).  Despite the diversity, Rennie managed to teach to all of us, providing challenging questions and discussions with and for both groups.   He was also a regular entrant in the competitions which used to run in the weekly Nation Review (and a fellow-admirer of the My Sunday cartoons of Victoria Roberts), and I recall one occasion when a student mentioned seeing his name as a competition winner, and the class was then diverted into an enjoyable discussion of tactics for these competitions.

Continue reading ‘Australian logic: a salute to Malcolm Rennie’

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Thinkers of renown

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-06
in Books, Culture, Logic, Mathematics, Music, Politics, Post-Industrial Nomads, Religion, Science, marketing strategy and obits
. Closed

The recent death of mathematician Jim Wiegold (1934-2009), whom I once knew, has led me to ponder the nature of intellectual influence.  Written matter – initially, hand-copied books, then printed books, and now the Web – has been the main conduit of influence.   For those of us with a formal education, lectures and tutorials are another means of influence, more direct than written materials.   Yet despite these broadcast methods, we still seek out individual contact with others.  Speaking for myself, it is almost never the knowledge or facts of others, per se, that I have sought or seek in making personal contact, but rather their various different ways of looking at the world.   In mathematical terminology, the ideas that have influenced me have not been the solutions that certain people have for particular problems, but rather the methods and perspectives they use for approaching and tackling problems, even when these methods are not always successful. 

To express my gratitude, I thought I would list some of the people whose ideas have influenced me, either directly through their lectures, or indirectly through their books and other writings.   In the second category, I have not included those whose ideas have come to me mediated through the books or lectures of others, which therefore excludes many mathematicians whose work has influenced me (in particular:  Newton, Leibniz, Cauchy, Weierstrauss, Cantor, Frege, Poincare, Hilbert, Lebesque, Godel, and Kolmogorov).  I have also not included the many writers of poetry, fiction, history and biography whose work has had great impact on me.  These two categories also exclude people whose intellectual influence has been manifest in non-verbal forms, such as through visual arts or music, or via working together, since those categories need posts of their own.

Teachers & lecturers I have had who have influenced my thinking include:  Leo Birsen (1902-1992), Sr. Claver Butler RSM (d. 2009), Burgess Cameron, Sr. Clare Castle RSM,  John Coates, Dot Crowe, James Cutt, Bro. Clive Davis FMS, Tom Donaldson (1945-2006), Sol Encel, Richard Gill, Rachel Harland, Chip Heathcote, Alec Hope (1907-2000),  John Hutchinson, Marg Keetles, Joe Lynch, Robert Marks, John McBurney (1932-1998), David Midgley, Terry O’Neill, Jim Penberthy* (1917-1999), Malcolm Rennie (1940-1980), John Roberts, Gisela Soares, Brian Stacey (1946-1996), Frank Torpie, Myrtle Torrens (1909-1984), Neil Trudinger, David Urquhart-Jones, Frederick Wedd (1890-1972), Gary Whale, Ted Wheelwright (1921-2007), and John Woods.

People whose writings have influenced my thinking include: John Baez, Ole Barndorff-Nielsen, Charlotte Joko Beck, Johan van Bentham, Mark Evan Bonds, John Cage (1912-1992), Albert Camus (1913-1960), John Miller Chernoff, Sam Eilenberg (1913-1998), Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), Kyle Gann, Alfred Gell (1945-1997), Herb Gintis, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Hamblin (1922-1985), Vaclav Havel,  Jaakko Hintikka, Eric von Hippel, Wilfrid Hodges, Christmas Humphreys (1901-1983), Jon Kabat-Zinn, Herman Kahn (1922-1983), Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), Paul Krugman, Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), Trevor Leggett (1914-2000), George Leonard (1923-2010), Brad de Long, Donald MacKenzie,  Saunders Mac Lane, Karl Marx (1818-1883), Grant McCracken, Henry Mintzberg, Philip Mirowski, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Michael Porter, Charles Reich, Jean-Francois Revel (1924-2006), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys), Oliver Sacks, George Shackle (1903-1992), Cosma Shalizi, Raymond Smullyan, Rory Stewart, Anne Sweeney (d. 2007), Nassim Taleb, Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009), Scott Turner, Roy Weintraub, Geoffrey Vickers (1894-1982), and Richard Wilson.

FOOTNOTES: 

* Which makes me a grand-pupil of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979).

** Of course, this being the World-Wide-Web, I need to explicitly say that nothing in what I have written here should be taken to mean that I agree with anything in particular which any of the people mentioned here have said or written.




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